A Biography of Mefloquine

A Biography of Mefloquine and Global Health Practices, 1969 to 2019 provides insights into practices of the pharmaceutical industry and global health from the anti-malarial agent mefloquine’s synthetization at the Experimental Therapeutics Division of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) in Washington DC in 1969 to the Mefloquine Mass Tort Action Canada in 2019. Examining clinical trials from North American prisons and hospitals to the Tropical Diseases Research Centre in Ndola, Zambia, it investigates how knowledge on mefloquine and malaria was negotiated, exchanged, silenced or forgotten and how this first case of a public-private venture undertaken in regard to the development of a drug set examples for the emergence of private public partnerships in global health. It is interested in the collaboration of WRAIR, pharmaceutical companies such as F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG and Mepha Pharma AG and the WHO Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) and analyses knowledge encounters and power relations.