This post was contributed by Ari Samsky.

It is adapted from his paper “Medical Humanitarianism Without Humans: How international drug donation programs reshape health, disease, and local law,” which won the 2009 Rudolph Virchow Graduate Paper Award.

In Paris in March of 2008 I attended an international coordinating meeting of non-governmental groups involved in the control of onchocerciasis, a blinding …