Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment Has Betrayed the Developing World [Paperback]

Edward C. Green (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2011

Harvard University researcher Edward Green shows how four forces—ideology, politics, a fixation on technology, and money—have produced AIDS policy failures in Africa, where two-thirds of all AIDS victims live. Dr. Green calls for a more flexible and empirically based policy focused on promoting fidelity—the only approach that has proven effective in Africa. 

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Broken Promises combines a remarkable ‘Present at the Creation’ perspective with historical and scientific data to tell a riveting story of how AIDS prevention in Africa went so terribly wrong. You may agree or disagree with Green, but you will never be bored. The lessons go beyond AIDS and even ‘foreign aid’ to the very process of how consensus is formed in our supposedly modern scientific world.”
—Norman Hearst, Professor, University of California, San Francisco

“Dr. Edward Green is a pioneer of the approach currently gaining favor for African HIV epidemics: discouraging multiple and concurrent partners and encouraging male circumcision. Broken Promises argues for an approach to AIDS that is more African as well as more evidence based.”
—Cedza Dlamini, Ubuntu Institute, South Africa

“Condoms used consistently and correctly do work effectively for couples in some countries, but condom marketing in Africa encourages earlier, riskier sex with more partners, increasing AIDS. Broken Promises explains that difficult but very important distinction.”
—Nick Danforth, Resident Scholar, Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University

Book Description

Harvard researcher Edward Green describes how Western ideology—fueled by political polarization and money—sabotaged the most successful AIDS program in history and inadvertently brought a holocaust to Africa. He calls for new emphasis on promoting fidelity—the only strategy (besides circumcision) proven to work there.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Polipoint Press; 1 edition (February 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1936227002
• ISBN-13: 978-1936227006
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,692,820 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Most Important Stories of Our Times January 22, 2011

By D. McNeill

Format:Paperback

This is one of the most important stories of the last decades, an amazing tale of incompetence and holocaust. We knew how to curb AIDS in Africa. The government of Uganda had shown exactly how: Saturate the nation with a pro-fidelity message. Its campaign cut the AIDS rate by one-third, a success never achieved before or since.

Then Westerners arrived. They ignored this proven program and instead urged condoms on everyone. But AIDS in Africa is a population-wide problem, and no one has ever gotten a whole population to use condoms. We have no idea how to do it.

So wherever Westerners went with the condom strategy, the AIDS rate rose. In Botswana, for instance, it reached 25 percent of the adult population. Millions lie in their graves right now because the West ignored a proven policy and pressured Africans to accept an unproven one.

Edward Green has fought a long, lonely, even astonishing battle on behalf of the approach that works. If we had listened to him earlier, there would have been far fewer burials in the cemeteries and orphans in the African streets. Broken Promises tells a breathtaking story of our times and it can still save lives. Maybe millions.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Do Not Trust Anyone Who Hates This Book January 19, 2011

By Amanda U.

Format:Paperback

I received this book today, and it is even more masterful than I hoped it would be. I am an investigative medical journalist. When I first interviewed Ted Green years ago, I urged him to write a book for a popular audience. He has done so, and it's truly extraordinary.

Green, you may recall, is the preeminent scientist and former head of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at Harvard, who scandalized the rulers of this present age in 2009 when he publicly agreed with Pope Benedict XVI that condom promotions are not the solution to AIDS in Africa, that the only way to reverse the pandemic is to do what Ugandans did when the pandemic began: to promote fidelity as the pillar of our AIDS response.

Although Green defended the Pope on the pages of the Washington Post, he is not a Catholic nor even a Christian. And he's certainly not a conservative. This outspoken, liberal whistle-blower takes on blind U.S. politicians and the tired old "AIDS establishment" in ways that plainly demonstrate he's his own man,a truly original thinker.

An uncompromising defender of Africans' rights to prevent the pandemic their way, anthropologist Green has long recognized the simple truth that millions of Africans lying in their graves today would still be alive if the "AIDS establishment" (a powerful coalition of Western AIDS organizations who've misspent billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars) had only heeded the African solution to AIDS and had promoted fidelity first.

Further, he has the curriculum vitae and the scientific ammunition to prove it.

Read this book. Absorb it. It will completely change your thinking about AIDS prevention in Africa. This book is a job brilliantly done. Green has suffered much for the truth, and he has not given up.... In his defense of the weak and powerless, he is a hero who has risked his entire illustrious career in an attempt to get out the truth. Anyone who angrily attacks this work is knowingly or unknowingly in league with those who are promoting misleading public-health messages that have needlessly claimed millions of African lives. Read more ›

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Compulsively readable, courageous and convincing March 6, 2011

By D. Gold

Format:Paperback

Could the public health community have bred a holocaust in Africa? I was initially unsure, but I'm not unsure any longer. As this dazzling, airtight book shows, the evidence is clear: the pro-fidelity program in Uganda succeeded and the Western-backed condom programs in other nations have worsened the problem. We fought fire with gasoline.

Yet we still hear Westerners urging condoms as the solution in Africa. You pretty much want to take them by the ear, haul them over to Kampala, and have them talk to the people in the street.

This compulsively readable book tells of even more benighted efforts, which even a little thought would have squelched. For instance, Westerners stated again and again that poverty was a risk factor for African AIDS. But the more money you have, the more freedom you have, and statistically the more sexual liaisons. And studies show exactly that: richer, better-educated Africans have higher rates of AIDS. The risk factor is wealth, not poverty.

Similarly, Western organizations repeatedly claimed that gender equality was essential to slowing African AIDS. Yet if so, we might never conquer African AIDS. Even Japan, a very advanced nation, doesn't have gender equality. But we don't have to worry on this score. Since gender equality correlates with wealth, it too is a risk factor for AIDS.

Dr. Green deserves some kind of prize for this brilliant work and for his courageous, tireless efforts on behalf of the truth. I can't help wonder: How many orphans are roaming the streets because we didn't listen to him? How many Africans are lying in their graves?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Contrarian View on AIDS Prevention January 19, 2011

By Prufrock

Format:Paperback

Dr. Edward Green has presented a brilliant and informed argument that the exclusive focus on condoms to prevent AIDS in Africa has failed. This book should stimulate new thoughts on AIDS prevention. It is sure to be controversial.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Book for All March 17, 2011

By M. Moore

Format:Paperback

Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment Has Betrayed the Developing World

This is an important book, not only for those interested in AIDS and the global fight to control the disease but also for anyone who thinks about the world we live in. We may hear complaints about the politicization of science in a sound-bite, but this is the documented and shocking story of such a phenomenon responsible for the ongoing deaths of untold numbers around the world.

I first became aware of Dr. Green's work many years ago. I was puzzled when "AIDS in Africa" became a big item in the news, as I knew that some countries in Africa, especially Uganda, had already been devastated by the disease and were actually turning things around. (I think attention turned to Africa when HIV became a treatable illness in the developed world with the advent of new medications.) I then became aware of Dr. Green's work documenting how officials in Uganda had responded to the crisis, and later how the Ugandan model was rejected in 2004 at the Global AIDS Conference in Bangkok.

Edward Green did everything a good scientist is supposed to do; make hypotheses, gather the data, analyze it objectively, and let the facts lead to conclusions and further inquiry and action. As is often the case in good science, the findings were different than the accepted beliefs. Dr. Green then encountered a scientific and political community that refused to follow the documented facts because of their established bias. While he documents his experience studying the spread of HIV, one can only wonder what other generally accepted scientific "facts" are used to support flawed public policy decisions.