Bøger af Sonia Shah

"[A] tour-de-force." --The New York Times "The Fever is a vivid and compelling history with a message that's entirely relevant today." --Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth ExtinctionRenowned science journalist Sonia Shah explores the surprising history of a disease that has haunted humanity since long before the pandemics of our own time. In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names--and opened their pocketbooks--in hopes of curing the disease. Still, at a time when the newly emergent COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the high cost of public health failures into stark relief, why aren't we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we've known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly one million of them? In The Fever, prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer these questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its effect on human history. Over the centuries, she finds, we've placed our hopes in a panoply of drugs and technologies, only to find them dashed. From the settling of the New World to the construction of the Panama Canal, through wars and the advances of the Industrial Revolution, Shah tracks malaria's jagged ascent and the tragedies in its wake, revealing a parasite every bit as persistent as the insects that carry it. Combining lucid prose and original reporting from Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, India, and elsewhere, The Fever captures the curiously fascinating, utterly devastating history of one of humanity's most dogged foes--yielding essential lessons for our own time.

Hailed by John le Carr as an act of courage on the part of its author and singled out for praise by the leading medical journals in the United States and the United Kingdom, The Body Hunters uncovers the real-life story behind le Carrs acclaimed novel The Constant Gardener and the feature film based on it."e;A trenchant expos . . . meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence"e; (Publishers Weekly), Sonia Shahs riveting journalistic account shines a much-needed spotlight on a disturbing new global trend. Drawing on years of original research and reporting in Africa and Asia, Shah examines how the multinational pharmaceutical industry, in its quest to develop lucrative drugs, has begun exporting its clinical research trials to the developing world, where ethical oversight is minimal and desperate patients abound. As the New England Journal of Medicine notes, it is critical that those engaged in drug development, clinical research and its oversight, research ethics, and policy know about these stories, which tell of an impossible choice being faced by many of the worlds poorest patientsbe experimented upon or die for lack of medicine.