Friday, November 10, 2006

New Book: The Body Hunters

Independent journalist Sonia Shah's new book The Body Hunters describes "how the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative new drugs, has begun quietly exporting its clinical research business to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal, and desperate patients abundant. Faced with crumbling facilities, miniscule budgets and towering health crises, developing countries often encourage these very trials, even as they cause scarce resources to be diverted from providing care toward the business of servicing drug companies."

"If the history of human experimentation tells us anything, from the bloody vivisections of the first millenium to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it is that the potential for abuse will fall heaviest on the poorest and most powerless among us."
www.soniashah.com/index.php