Marseille 2007
| Abstract #535 - AIDS medical research in China, an exploratory enquiry | ||||
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Session: 26.4: Posters B (Poster) on Tuesday in Chaired by Authors: Presenting Author: Dr Evelyne Micollier - IRD, France |
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| Additional Authors: | ||||
| Aim: The study focuses on AIDS clinical trials conducted in China in biomedicine and TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). Although biomedicine secures without any doubt a dominant space in the system, both medicines are integrated in the official health system since the 1950s. This specificity stems from the Chinese administrative and political structure and is worth to be recalled here as it has significant implications in terms of policy, intervention and relations among different categories of actors and organizations either global, national or local. | ||||
| Method / Issue: Data are collected with common ethnographic tools (non-directed/semi-directed interviews, in-site observations) and are cross-cut with results of archival and documentary research. Field research is based on an approach focusing on social dynamics, namely mobilising actors, their actions, ideas and beliefs, and events surrounding them at a micro-social scale in order to understand observed facts and discourses in their complexity. This research is currently conducted in Beijing within the framework of IRD-CAMS/PUMC (Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences/Peking Union Medical College) social science programme on AIDS, and in a comparative perspective, is part of a programme on clinical research in Africa and Asia coordinated by UMR 145 of IRD and CReCSS, favouring methods and theories of social anthropology. | ||||
| Results / Comments: The development of clinical research is promoted by a strong political will assessed through significant shifts in national research and health policies. In times of scaling up ART standardization, AIDS research policy is designed for helping in reaching the ambitious objectives of the new AIDS treatment and care scheme whose implementation guidelines were issued in April 2004, and also for contributing to global research on AIDS and to international medical research involving prestige and national pride. Some trials aim at testing innovative treatments in biomedicine such as preventive and therapeutic vaccines involving new medicines and biotechnologies. Innovative treatments in TCM, mainly new combination of products, are tested as well. AIDS clinical research in TCM was initiated in 1985 in the US by an American team (Cohen, Abrams and Burack, Quan Yin Healing Arts center in San-Francisco) and in 1989 in Africa by a Chinese team (Lu Weibo, AIDS Department of the National TCM Research Institute in Beijing). | ||||
| Discussion: Following an overview of a few research programs and results, a number of economic and social implications of the trials already conducted or to come and related-ethical issues, will be discussed. The study of clinical trials, from the elaboration of a protocol to the commoditization of innovative drugs or biotechnologies, may help to unveil the cultural politics at work through a number of social processes such as negotiations and tensions among categories of actors whose interests are clashing. Interfaces of knowledge and practice are approached through experiment in biomedicine and TCM revealing a process of biomedicalisation of TCM over time even though their rationales are radically diverging. | ||||
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