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BookmarkPaul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru.
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A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor.
This "peculiarly modern inequality" that permeates AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious diseases such as Ebola and cholera, is laid bare in Farmer's harrowing stories of sickness and suffering.Challenging the accepted methodologies of epidemiology and international health, he points out that most current explanatory strategies, from "cost-effectiveness" to patient "noncompliance," inevitably lead to blaming the victims.
In reality, larger forces, global as well as local, determine why some people are sick and others are shielded from risk.
Yet this moving account is far from a hopeless inventory of insoluble problems.
Farmer writes of what can be done in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, by physicians determined to treat those in need.
Infections and Inequalities weds meticulous scholarship with a passion for solutions--remedies for the plagues of the poor and the social maladies that have sustained them..
For more information about the title Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, read the full description at Amazon.com, or see the following related books:
AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care) — Does the scientific "theory" that HIV came to North America from Haiti stem from underlying attitudes of racism and ethnocentrism in the United ... > read more
Global AIDS: Myths And Facts : Tools for Fighting the AIDS Pendemic — AIDS is the most devastating communicable disease in history, and structures of poverty and injustice are magnifying the crisis in underresourced ... > read more
Plagues and Peoples — No small themes for historian William McNeill: he is a writer of big, sweeping books, from The Rise of the West to The History of the World. Plagues ... > read more
The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS — In 1993, Helen Epstein, a scientist working with a biotechnology company searching for an AIDS vaccine, moved to Uganda, where she witnessed ... > read more
