The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients

"The Body Hunters recounts the way the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative drugs, has begun quietly exporting its clinical research business to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound. Faced with crumbling facilities, minuscule budgets, and lowering 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." Based on several years of original research and reporting from Africa and Asia, The Body Hunters is a damning indictment of a new realm in the exploitation of the world's poor. Tracing the checkered history of Western medical science in poor countries, it lays bare the impossible choice being faced by many patients in the developing world: be experimented upon or die for lack of medicine.