The project brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, combining methods and perspectives from the humanities, social sciences and medicine to investigate how active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and generic antibiotics are produced, regulated and exported from China and India to Africa, and particularly Tanzania.
In Tanzania we follow national regulations efforts and the circulation patterns of antibiotics in formal and informal markets, into the rural Kilimanjaro region where we investigate how small and large-scale farmers make use of these drugs for humans, animals and in the fields.
Projects
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From Chemicals to “Cheap Fix”: Unravelling the Infrastructures of the Global Flow of Chinese-manufactured Antibiotics Jan. 29, 2024
My primary responsibility in the team is to research the role of Chinese-manufactured antibiotics and their Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) in the global commodity chain of pharmaceuticals. Researcher: Mingyuan Zhang
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Generics across the Ocean: Production, regulation, and export of Indian antibiotics for African markets Jan. 29, 2024
The primary aim of my PhD project is to develop a broad social, political, and historical understanding of the production of generic antibiotics in India and the export of antibiotics by India’s pharmaceutical industry, focusing on the flow of antibiotics across the Indian Ocean to African markets. Researcher: Lise Bjerke
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Historical Development of antimicrobial regulation making and its role in addressing antibiotic resistance in Tanzania Jan. 29, 2024
My project aims to employ a social-historical approach to explore the processes involved in the making and unmaking and practices around the development and implementation of policies and regulations of human and animal antibiotics of Asian origin in Tanzania, focusing on the post-socialist period, the mid-1980s to the present day. Researcher: Peter Mangesho
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Socioeconomic, ecological and material conditions for antibiotic use in farm lives in Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania: An ethnographic account Jan. 29, 2024
This PhD project focuses on the social, ecological and material forces that influence farmers to use antibiotics in the way they do, both for animals and themselves/families. Researcher: Alex Gateri
Background
Antibiotics are some of our most precious medical technologies. Introduced in the 1930s, they soon came to transform deadly diseases into treatable life events. Antibiotics are also the infrastructure of the health system – a necessary component of a broad range of advanced medical surgery.
Over the last decades, there has been an increasing concern that this old and potent technology is losing its power to heal due to growing numbers of resistant microbes worldwide. At the same time, only few new antibiotics have been developed since the 1980s, resulting in what is often described as the dry antibiotic pipeline.
The global markets for the old school generic antibiotics are rapidly shifting, from European and North American dominance, to an increasing production in the global South. This project therefore explores antibiotic production in and export from the global South, following antibiotic trajectories in the contemporary and historical trade routes from Asia to the markets in eastern Africa.
Aims
In close collaboration with local partners, the project employs long-term ethnographic fieldwork, document and policy analyses, and archival work to develop a theory of drug trajectories in the global South.
The project is also response to the call from leading medical journals, such as The Lancet and Science for research contributions from the humanities and social sciences.
With the project we aim to inspire a more sustainable and context-sensitive use of antibiotics by humans, animals and in the environment.
Financing
The Research Council of Norway, SAMKUL programme.
Start and Finish
2020 - 2025