Made up of alliances of biotech firms, government and university researchers, global health agencies, philanthropies, and pharmaceutical companies—in short, anyone and everyone involved in the ...development of TB drugs—PDPs aim to change fundamentally the ways in which drugs are developed and delivered. Craddock explores why and how some diseases became neglected; she offers a compelling explanation of why developing drugs for TB is so costly; she analyzes the influence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the principal funder of both Aeras and the TB Alliance; and she interrogates what might be motivating pharmaceutical corporations to ally with groups like Aeras and TB Alliance—it seems to be a combination of "corporate social responsibility" and the hope of breaking into new markets in places like Brazil and China. The introduction also narrates with exceptional clarity the history of drug patents and intellectual property law that is critical to understanding the challenges PDPs face.
In 1941, after decades of struggling to hold on to the remainder of their aboriginal home, the Hualapai Indians finally took their case to the Supreme Court—and won. The Hualapai case was the ...culminating event in a legal and intellectual revolution that transformed Indian law and ushered in a new way of writing Indian history that provided legal grounds for native land claims. But Making Indian Law is about more than a legal decision. It’s the story of Hualapai activists, and eventually sympathetic lawyers, who challenged both the Santa Fe Railroad and the U.S. government to a courtroom showdown over the meaning of Indian property rights—and the Indian past. At the heart of the Hualapai campaign to save the reservation was documenting the history of Hualapai land use. Making Indian Law showcases the central role that the Hualapai and their lawyers played in formulating new understandings of native people, their property, and their past. To this day, the impact of the Hualapai decision is felt wherever and whenever indigenous land claims are litigated throughout the world.
In the fifteen years following World War II more was done to combat tuberculosis than at any other time in world history. On every continent, hundreds of millions received the BCG (Bacillus Calmette ...Guérin) vaccine and millions more benefited from newly discovered antibiotics. TB research and attempts to control the disease knit together disparate populations and places as a network of experts and a matrix of ideas spread out across the globe linking the world through a common vaccine, a battery of antibiotics, and a knowledge network. Medicine became internationalized as organizations like the WHO and UNICEF began to see diseases as global problems and not solely the concern of individual countries.
From the time it emerged as an epidemic in the last decades of the nineteenth century until it had become their number-one health problem in the 1950s, multiple explanations for the etiology of ...tuberculosis (TB) among American Indians competed for prominence. None was more debated than racial susceptibility—and none held on with such tenacity. Various race-based explanations—Indians' inherent racial susceptibility, virgin soil theory, and degree of Indian blood—had great explanatory power. These explanations faded from view by the 1950s as a result of epidemiological research begun in the 1930s—research that for the first time filled in many of the pieces of the Indian TB puzzle and allowed TB specialists to know the unknown: who and where the disease struck and why. Combining case finding, X rays, sputum tests—all the modern methods of tracking a TB epidemic—the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was finally able to understand the Indian TB epidemic. But they also wanted to control it. To this end, the BIA and the Phipps Institute, under the direction of Esmond Long and Joseph Aronson, joined together to begin the first controlled trial of the BCG vaccine.
