aids & hiv

AIDS Update 2008 (Aids Update)

AIDS Update 2008 presents a balanced review of current research and information on HIV infection, HIV disease, and AIDS. AIDS Update 2008 places this discussion within a biological, medical, social, economic and legal framework, helping readers to more fully understand this modern-day pandemic.

The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS

A flame-throwing epidemiologist talks about sex, drugs, and the mistakes (dismal), ideologies (vicious), and hopes (realistic) of international AIDS prevention.

When people ask Elizabeth Pisani what she does for a living, she says, "sex and drugs." As an epidemiologist researching AIDS, she's been involved with international efforts to halt the disease for fourteen years. With swashbuckling wit and fierce honesty, she dishes on herself and her colleagues as they try to prod reluctant governments to fund HIV prevention for the people who need it most—drug injectors, gay men, sex workers, and johns.

Pisani chats with flamboyant Indonesian transsexuals about their boob jobs and watches Chinese streetwalkers turn away clients because their SUVs aren't nice enough. With verve and clarity, she shows the general reader how her profession really works; how easy it is to draw wrong conclusions from "objective" data; and, shockingly, how much money is spent so very badly. "Exhibit A": the 45 billion taxpayer dollars the Bush administration is committing to international AIDS programs. 12 illustrations.

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition

In the first major book on AIDS, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts examines the making of an epidemic. Shilts researched and reported the book exhaustively, chronicling almost day-by-day the first five years of AIDS. His work is critical of the medical and scientific communities' initial response and particularly harsh on the Reagan Administration, who he claims cut funding, ignored calls for action and deliberately misled Congress. Shilts doesn't stop there, wondering why more people in the gay community, the mass media and the country at large didn't stand up in anger more quickly. The AIDS pandemic is one of the most striking developments of the late 20th century and this is the definitive story of its beginnings.

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 States rather than from hard evidence? Anthropologist-physician Paul Farmer answers in the affirmative with this, the first full-length ethnographic study of AIDS in a poor society.

My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City saw its first AIDS patient in August 1985. Working in Johnson City was Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor specializing in infectious diseases who became, by necessity, the local AIDS expert. Out of his experience comes a startling, ultimately uplifting portrait of the American heartland.

28: Stories of AIDS in Africa

We Are All the Same: A Story of a Boy's Courage and a Mother's Love

Award-winning correspondent for ABC World News and Nightline Jim Wooten is a seasoned newsman who has covered tragedy the world over. Now he tells the story of Nkosi Johnson, an eleven-year-old South African boy born with AIDS into poverty in a shantytown and given only a few years to live. But his ailing mother managed to cross her country’s divisions of race and class to bring him to Gail Johnson, who would raise him for her. Before his own death at the age of twelve, Nkosi had become, in Nelson Mandela’s words, “an icon of the struggle for life” for millions in Africa and around the world. And he had changed Wooten’s life in ways Wooten is still discovering. We Are All the Same is a work of Biblical simplicity and power that reveals the astonishing resilience of the human spirit.

Fear of the Invisible

This book takes its readers on a journey into the very heart of the hunt for viruses - to the key experiments originally performed to prove that these invisibly small particles are the cause of diseases previously blamed on toxins or bacteria and into the latest research. It sheds light on the extraordinary assumptions that underlay much of this research - and on the vaccines that developed from this. The author, an investigative journalist who has researched and produced investigative films for the BBC, American and Australian television, was asked by parents with children severely ill after vaccination, to discover if the medical authorities were hiding anything from them. She agreed, but had no idea how long this search would take. She expected at best to uncover a small degree of contamination. On the ensuing decade-long journey of discovery, she learnt it is not just the added mercury that we have to worry about. She discovered that the top government scientists admit to colleagues that vaccines are contaminated with viruses from chickens, humans and monkeys, with RNA and DNA fragments, with 'cellular degradation products', and possibly 'oncogenes and prions.' They report alarmingly that it is impossible to commercially purify vaccines. They express great concerns, but the public is not told despite the possible consequences for long-term public health. A recent US court decision has linked autism with vaccine contamination. The author cites her sources by name - and gives references and Internet links where they are available. I She reveals evidence that the World Health Organisation has discovered the MMR vaccine is contaminated with chicken leukosis virus, but has decided not to tell the public of this, and to continue to make the vaccine with eggs from contaminated chickens. She reports US biowarfare researchers tried to create new agents to destroy our immune systems - and worked on a bacterium to make it a hospital superbug. Did they manage to create HIV? A senior professor told her that the vaccine program was so contaminated that HIV might well have spread though it without any need for military intervention. She set out to find the evidence to resolve this, and to learn how HIV apparently spread so far and fast. She needed to know more about this virus so went to the foundation research widely held today to have found HIV and proved it caused AIDS. She was then rocked to discover that this same research was investigated for scientific fraud for a five year period by powerful US scientific institutions and by Congress,. Why is this not widely known? She found their reports and discovered they found major errors in this research, some so serious that these made it impossible to repeat these experiments and thus to verify them! She reveals the evidence unearthed - reproducing key documents so the reader can assess them for themselves. This is explosive material. In the final part of this book the author reports recent research that is revolutionising biology and offering much hope for the future. These new developments shed new light on the relationships between our cells and viruses. They are not necessarily enemies. Readers may find these new developments radically change the ideas they have held about viruses since childhood. This book has over 500 references and includes several documents unearthed under Freedom of Information legislation. `It has a scientific glossary and is fully indexed..