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John Le Carre writes ficiton, as he did in "The Constant Gardener." But "The Constant Gardner" was based on fact, on the how big pharmaceutical firms have used the poor of the southern hemisphere, in particular, to serve as guinea pigs for medications to be sold at great profit in Western nations.

"The Constant Gardener" was fiction ground in fact; and "The Body Hunters" details the truth about "testing new drugs on the worlds poorest patients."

Indeed, John Le Carre wrote the foreward for "The Body Hunters"

Le Carre begins, "This book is an act of courage on the part of its author and publisher." He then reveals that he has received many book proposals to expose the pharmaceutical industry, but no one followed through except for Sonia Shah.

Why? Well as "The Constant Gardener" reveals, and Le Carre mentions in his forward, the authors or publishers found it "too risky" to proceed with the books.

Except for Sonia Shah and The New Press.

There is justifiable fear surrounding the public debate of what the big pharmaceutical industry is up to, because they have a lot of power and can do economic and legal harm to anyone who gets in their way.

In "The Constant Gardener," their ability to silence critics went much further than even that.

The publisher, The New Press, descibes "The Body Hunters: this way:

Medical research imposes burdens. But generally speaking, we don’t like to know it. . . . If the history of human experimentation tells us anything, from the bloody vivisections of the first millennium to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, it is that such burdens made secret will fall heaviest on the poorest and most powerless among us.
—FROM THE BODY HUNTERS

This groundbreaking book reveals the unethical drug-testing practices of the multinational pharmaceutical industry. In its quest to develop lucrative new drugs for the world’s rich, the industry has turned away from the health needs of the world’s poor. And yet, over the past decade, Big Pharma has quietly exported its clinical research business to the global South, where ethical oversight is minimal, and sick, poor, and desperate patients are abundant.

In The Body Hunters, investigative journalist Sonia Shah shows how the pharmaceutical industry is using testing procedures in the global South that would cause scandals in the developed world. In India, dozens of patients in drug trials have perished suffering deadly side effects known to the FDA; in Zambia, AIDS babies in clinical trials have been administered placebos.

The Body Hunters is based on several years of original research and reporting from Africa and Asia, and describes dozens of trials, as well as the checkered history of Western medical science in poor countries.



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