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Shah, Sonia. The Body hunters: testing new drugs on the world's poorest patients. New York: The New Press, 2008. 242p ISBN 978-1-59558-214-0 paper $16.95
John le Carré, premier British spy-thriller author, has written a brief introduction to this book, following the success of his best-selling novel The Constant Gardener, which treated fictionally the subject of pharmaceutical crimes. He states that most non-fiction books on the outrages of the legal drug industry are anathema to publishers, who deem the subject "too risky." This leaves us, the public, less informed and more vulnerable. No wonder le Carré says The Body Hunters is courageous.
Sonia Shah is an independent journalist who tackled another huge industry in her previous work, Crude: The Story of Oil, so one assumes she is no stranger to the danger of challenging the powers that be. In 77;e Body Hunters, she takes on what le Carré calls "Big Pharma."
The back story of medical research first made headlines in the early 1960s with the "thalidomide babies" - children born most horribly crippled because their mothers had taken an anti-nausea medicine that had been only...