AIDS: The Politics of Survival (Policy, Politics, Health, and Medicine Series) [Hardcover]

Nancy Krieger (Author), Glen Margo (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0895031221 | ISBN-13: 978-0895031228 | Publication Date: May 1, 1994

In one short decade, the politics of AIDS has become the politics of survival. In a world whose social order is changing before our eyes, AIDS insistently brings new meaning to the age-old question of what it is we must do to survive--as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations, as members of an interdependent world. This book brings together a collection of articles that frankly discuss what is will take to stop the AIDS epidemic and deal with the devastation it has already wrought.

The first section, "The Politics of AIDS," presents an analysis of AIDS in the United States developed in the mid-1980s. Building on this framework, the next section, "AIDS: Community Survival in the United States" examines issues of community survival and AIDS prevention in the United States in the 1990s, especially as they pertain to racial/ethnic minorities, children, and the urban poor. The third section, "Women and AIDS," discusses how gender relations shape the spread of AIDS in both economically developed and underdeveloped countries and includes detailed analyses of the situation in Zimbabwe and South Africa. This is followed by a section on

"Solidarity and AIDS," which considers the response to AIDS in Cuba and Brazil and evaluates global efforts to prevent AIDS. The final section, "The Histories of AIDS," critically assesses two prevalent paradigms used to understand AIDS--that of AIDS as "gay plague" and as "chronic disease." It examines their implications for health policy, contrasts individualistic versus collective, and biomedical versus social, understandings of the disease, and outlines alternative strategies for scientific research, health policy, and AIDS prevention.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Although it is hard to realize in the face of such numbers and in the face of so much official inattention, each person who gets AIDS is just as much a caring human being, just as much a spark of consciousness, love, and pain, as you or I. One of the benefits of this book is that Krieger and Margo never forgets this, and never forgets that the appropriate reactions to a horror like the AIDS epidemic are compassion for the sick, intelligent thought to develop strategies to minimize the damage, and hatred for the system that has turned into a massive catastrophe.

This book highlights the social and political aspects of AIDS. It shows how the class, race, national, and gender inequalities that are the fundamental building blocks of society underlie the spread of HIV in the United States, other economically developed countries, semi-developed economies and more impoverished countries. Structured racial inequality underlies the fact that in the United States a higher percentage of African American and Latino than of white homosexual and bisexual men, drug injectors, sexual partners of drug injectors, and their children are infected with HIV. Racism and class inequality have fostered the use of drug injectors as scapegoats to divert public attention away from the economic and social decay that really cause the decay of urban life, and this has made it all but impossible to mount effective prevention programs such as needle exchanges and the fostering of drug users' organizations to prevent the spread of HIV among drug injectors and from them to others."

-- Dr. Samuel R. Friedman, National Development and Research Institutes, Inc., New York, NY

Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Baywood Pub Co (May 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0895031221
• ISBN-13: 978-0895031228
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,269,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)