Product Details
Invisible Cure

Invisible Cure
By Helen Epstein

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Product Description

In 1993, Helen Epstein, a scientist working with a biotechnology company searching for an AIDS vaccine, moved to Uganda, where she witnessed firsthand the suffering caused by the epidemic. Now, in her unsparing and illuminating account of this global disease, she describes how international health experts, governments, and ordinary Africans have struggled to understand the rapid and devastating spread of the disease in Africa, and traces the changes wrought by new medical developments and emerging political realities. It is an account of scientific discovery and intrigue with implications far beyond the fight against one tragic disease.
 
The AIDS epidemic is partly a consequence of the rapid transition of African societies from an agrarian past to an impoverished present. Millions of African people have yet to find a place in an increasingly globalized world, and their poverty and social dislocation have generated an earthquake in gender relations that deeply affects the spread of HIV. But Epstein argues that there are solutions to this crisis, and some of the most effective ones may be simpler than many people assume.
 
Written with conviction, knowledge, and insight, Why Don't They Listen? will change how we think about the worst health crisis of the past century, and our strategies for improving global public health.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #500471 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-05-17
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: 1.24" h x 6.42" w x 9.20" l, 1.35 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 326 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Epstein, a public health specialist and molecular biologist who has worked on AIDS vaccine research, overturns many of our received notions about why AIDS is rampant in Africa and what to do about it. She charges that Western governments and philanthropists, though well-meaning, have been wholly misguided, and that Africans themselves, who understand their own cultures, often know best how to address HIV in their communities. Most significant is Epstein's discussion of concurrent sexual relations in Africa. Africans often engage in two or three long-term concurrent relationships—which proves more conducive to the spread of AIDS than Western-style promiscuity. Persuade Africans to forgo concurrency for monogamy, and the infection rate plummets, as it did in Uganda in the mid-1990s. On the other hand, ad campaigns focused on condom use helped imply falsely that only prostitutes and truck drivers get AIDS. In addition, Epstein examines what she calls the "African earthquake": social and economic upheaval that have also eased the spread of HIV. Epstein is a lucid writer, translating abstruse scientific concepts into language nonspecialists can easily grasp. Provocative, passionate and incisive, this may be the most important book on AIDS published this year—indeed, it may even save lives. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Some countries in Africa report that approximately one-third of their adult populations are infected with HIV. Epstein wondered how such a state of affairs came about. Seeking answers, she contracted with a biotechnical company to go to Africa and work toward discovering an AIDS vaccine. What she subsequently learned exploded some preconceived and widely shared notions about AIDS, about how African culture all but ensures its spread, and about what might be a deceptively simple answer to the complex question of how to stem that spread. Her absorbing report reveals governmental inefficiencies and medical bureaucracies and social structures that have done nothing to slow the epidemic's pace—and may be accelerating it. Besides the epidemic's social and medical aspects, she discusses the business of AIDS, and she examines the mystery of how the HIV infection rate dropped some 70 percent between 1992 and 1997 in Uganda and the Kagera region of Tanzania; she believes that the invisible cure involved in that plunge provides clues to resolving the issue of AIDS in Africa generally. Chavez, Donna
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Her tone is level and undogmatic, but the news that Helen Epstein brings from the African front lines about AIDS is searing. So many lives have been lost, so much time and money wasted in badly-designed public and private campaigns against the disease. What actually works is both simple and subtle. There may be no magic bullet--there may never be a vaccine--but there are success stories, even in very poor countries. This is a landmark study. "
--William Finnegan, author of Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country and A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique