Customer Reviews

Points to Consider: Responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa,Asia, and the Caribbean

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It is extremely sad to keep in mind the 40 million sick or dead from HIV that might have been avoided if public health measures had been taken.
Gisselquist brings together a lot of data, and Points to Consider is a must for the concerned person.
Today HIV epidemic continue via dirty needles unchecked. Last year, in 2007, 100 children were found contaminated with HIV as the Kyrgyzstan investigated, and 133 in 2006 in Kazakhstan: re-use of needles without sterilization, contaminated multidose vials, low paid medical staff, lack of supplies- all responsible for death of the children. Official litterature and dogma prevent investigations in Africa.. It's more convenient to blame HIV on promiscuous sex.. Garance at safeobserver.org

As someone interested in the AIDS pandemic in Africa, I am familiar with several of the publications by Gisselquist and his colleagues. With an article here and there calling to look at the rates of HIV infection from medical care (unsterile instruments and needles) it is hard to put the whole puzzle together. With Points to Consider, Gisselquist puts the whole puzzle together. Why is WHO concerned primarily with sexual transmission of HIV (which occurs about in less than 1 sexual encounter per 1000) when tainted medical devices have about a 90% transmission rate?

He makes an excellent case for how this is happening and why differences in sexual mixing patterns are not enough to explain the differences in HIV infection rates. The book points out an important anomaly in the current paradigm about how HIV is spreading in Africa. By ignoring nosocomial infections, WHO is allowing the pandemic to spread. The answer is simple: once use needles and syringes and clean sterile medical instruments.

As someone previously uninformed in this area with no scientific background, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book well written, easy to read, and highly persuasive. There is no dearth of scientific rigor in the book, but the footnotes are discreetly placed at the end of the chapters, and the references in the body of the work do not intrude on the narrative, allowing the author to make his case quickly and confidently. Dr. Gisselquist lays bare the western ethnocentrism at the heart of international health community's early collective misreading of the causes of the HIV AIDs crisis in Africa, and more importantly, the medical practices necessary now to address it. This book should be required reading for all policy makers and NGOs invovled in international health policy and planning.