Development Blogs.com

This week sees the launch of the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City. Some of what is going on in the conference can be followed on the website that the Kaiser Family Foundation has set up. But you really have to be there to get the buzz, the celebrities, the infighting, as well as whatever new research results are on offer. Part of my summer reading has included Elizabeth Pisani's The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, in which she describes the XV International AIDS Conference as follows:In 2004 Thailand hosted the Fifteenth International AIDS Conference. Once upon a time, these conferences were about science. Nowadays they are about institutional posturing, theatrical activism and money. Lots of money. The Bangkok conference cost US $18.5...

Last year, Jill Fisher at Arizona State University wrote a very interesting article on the concept of 'ready-to-recruit' populations for biomedical research for the journal Qualitative Inquiry (subscription required, goddammit). The term 'ready-to-recruit' is a concept used in the pharmaceutical industry to describe populations that do not really have an attractive alternative to joining a clinical trial, because they live in circumstances of poverty, where there are few doctors, where local medical care is sub-standard and so on. Fisher prefers the more ethically charged term 'ready to consent' to describe these populations, because they are not just easy to access, but gaining their consent is a piece of cake. Practically all you need to do is ask. Socio-economic forces do the rest....