In the Eye of the Storm tells the remarkable story of AIDS volunteers who engaged in a struggle for life against death. The people who volunteered to help during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s provided compassion and support to heavily stigmatised people. These volunteers provided in-home care for the sick and dying, staffed needle exchanges and telephone help-lines, produced educational resources, served on boards of management, and provided friendship and practical support, among many other roles. They helped people affected by the virus to navigate a medical system that in preceding decades had been openly hostile towards the marginalised communities of homosexuals, drug users and sex workers. In the process, volunteering left and indelible mark on the lives and outlooks of these volunteers. For the first time, by focusing on individual life stories, this book explores the crucial role of the men and women who volunteered at at time of disaster. Despite their critical role, they have not been sufficiently recognised. Through their stories, drawn from oral histories conducted by the authors, we see how those on the front-line navigated and survived a devastating epidemic, and the long-term impact of those grim years of illness, death and loss.

Although adopting global norms often improves domestic systems of governance, domestic obstacles to norm diffusion are frequent. States that decide to reinvent their political authority simultaneously evaluate which current global norms are desirable and to what extent. In this study, Vlad Kravtsov argues that recent debates about the nature of authority in Putin's Russia and Mbeki's South Africa have resulted in a set of unique ideas on the cardinal goals of the state. This is the first book to explore how these consensual ideas have shaped health governance and impinged on norm diffusion processes. Detailed comparisons of HIV/AIDS governance systems in Russia and South Africa illustrate the argument. The Kremlin's dislike of international recommendations stemmed from the rapidly maturing statism and great power syndrome. Pretoria's responses to global AIDS norms were consistent with the ideas of the African Renaissance, which highlighted indigenousness, market-based empowerment, and moral leadership in global affairs. This book explains how and why the governments under investigation framed the nature of the epidemic, provided evidence-based prevention services, increased universal access to proven lifesaving medicines, and interacted with other participants in social practice.

A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period commonly called 'The AIDS Crisis'. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid '90s, however, the meaning of an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable many people living with HIV to lead a healthy, regular life, but how has this dramatic shift impacted the representation of gay men and HIV in popular culture? Positive Images is the first detailed examination of how the relationship between gay men and HIV has transformed in the past two decades. From Queer as Folk to Chemsex, The Line of Beauty to The Normal Heart, Dion Kagan examines literature, film, TV, documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world to unearth the socio-cultural foundations underpinning this 'post-crisis' period. His analyses provide acute insights into the fraught legacies of the AIDS Crisis and its continued presence in the modern queer consciousness.

The Sub-Specialty Care of HIV-Infected Patients is a synthesis of current policies, practices, and recommendations regarding the management of HIV-infected patients, authored by academicians at two major Houston medical institutions, Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas at Houston. The chapters represent the traditional sub-specialties of internal medicine, with infectious disease represented in chapters on immunizations and on the current new directions in antiretroviral management. Additional clinical material is provided by members from the Department of Medicine, the Department of Neurology, and the Department of Psychiatry. The material is intended as a discussion of current positions and directions, with the realization that these change often and that the material is intended thus to be current pertaining to the date of submission (October 31, 2017). Almost all of the providers for this book have worked at the Thomas Street Clinic in Houston, a multidisciplinary, free-standing clinic dedicated to the care of HIV-infected patients and the dedicatee of this work.

In Zambia, due to the rise of tuberculosis and the closely connected HIV epidemic, a large number of children have experienced the illness or death of at least one parent. Children as Caregivers examines how well intentioned practitioners fail to realize that children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill and demonstrates why understanding children's care is crucial for global health policy. Using ethnographic methods, and listening to the voices of the young as well as adults, Jean Hunleth makes the caregiving work of children visible. She shows how children actively seek to "get closer" to ill guardians by providing good care. Both children and ill adults define good care as attentiveness of the young to adults' physical needs, the ability to carry out treatment and medication programs in the home, and above all, the need to maintain physical closeness and proximity. Children understand that losing their guardians will not only be emotionally devastating, but that such loss is likely to set them adrift in Zambian society, where education and advancement depend on maintaining familial, reciprocal relationships.

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary "Lammy" Award in LGBTQ Studies The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ "two-spirit" identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Prior to contact with European settlers, most Native American tribes held their two-spirit members in high esteem, even considering them spiritually advanced. However, after contact - and religious conversion - attitudes changed and social and cultural support networks were ruptured. This discrimination led to a breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and practices, which in turn pushed many two-spirit members to participate in high-risk behaviors. The result is a disproportionate number of two-spirit members who currently test positive for HIV. Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco's two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.

Since the beginning of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic in the early 1980s, many individuals living with the disease have had difficulty finding affordable, stable housing. As individuals become ill, they may find themselves unable to work, while at the same time facing health care expenses that leave few resources to pay for housing. In addition, many persons living with AIDS struggled to afford housing even before being diagnosed with the disease. The financial vulnerability associated with AIDS, as well as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, results in a greater likelihood of homelessness among persons living with the disease. At the same time, those who are homeless may be more likely to engage in activities through which they could acquire or transmit HIV. Further, recent research has indicated that individuals living with HIV who live in stable housing have better health outcomes than those who are homeless or unstably housed, and that they spend fewer days in hospitals and emergency rooms. This book describes research that shows how housing and health status are related and the effects of stable housing on patient health. It also describes the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program, the only federal program that provides housing and services specifically for persons who are HIV positive or who have AIDS, together with their families. In addition, the book describes how a small portion of funds appropriated through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program may be used by states and local jurisdictions to provide short-term housing assistance for persons living with HIV/AIDS.

Thirty years after AIDS was first recognized, the American South constitutes the epicenter of the United States' epidemic. Southern states claim the highest rates of new infections, the most AIDS-related deaths, and the largest number of adults and adolescents living with the virus. Moreover, the epidemic disproportionately affects African American communities across the region. Using the history of HIV in North Carolina as a case study, Stephen Inrig examines the rise of AIDS in the South in the period from the early spread and discovery of the disease through the late nineties. Drawing on epidemiological, archival, and oral history sources, Inrig probes the social determinants of health that put poor, rural, and minority communities at greater risk of HIV infection in the American South. He also examines the difficulties that health workers and AIDS organizations faced in reaching those communities, especially in the early years of the epidemic. His analysis provides an important counterweight to most accounts of the early history of the disease, which focus on urban areas and the spread of AIDS in the gay community. As one of the first historical studies of AIDS in a southern state, North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS provides powerful insight into the forces and factors that have made AIDS such an intractable health problem in the American South and the greater United States.

Why do alternative, non-scientific explanations of HIV/AIDS continue to circulate in South Africa's townships after almost 30 years of AIDS education? In A different kind of AIDS, David Dickinson explores the folk and lay theories that still circulate within township communities, despite extensive educational efforts and the availability of antiretroviral treatment. Dickinson's investigations are in partnership with HIV/AIDS peer educators and alongside township residents; and he argues that these theories constitute a robust hydra of beliefs that underlies and supports the de facto plural health care system in South Africa. The book explores township life and language and includes a methodological manifesto aimed at social science research students. The end-result is essential reading for the academic and lay reader alike, and a deeply sympathetic portrait of South African realities today.

""AIDS, Culture, and Gay Men" addresses the urgent need for research on HIV and the behaviors of men who have sex with men. Based on studies in the U.S., Australia, Greece, and Belgium, the authors provide ethnographic, epidemiological, biological, and historical data and cover issues of risk, ethics, language, and the nature of evidence, all directed at developing effective forms of intervention."--Shirley Lindenbaum, City University of New York "This book makes a compelling case that culturally oriented anthropological research is essential in understanding and responding to the AIDS crises among MSM and in gay communities."--Serena Nanda, City University of New York There are approximately seven million adult gay and bisexual men in the United States and 120 million adult gay and bisexual men globally. This highly readable volume of original essays explores the cultural dimensions of AIDS among men who have sex with men (MSM). The traditional emphasis in HIV/AIDS research within gay communities has focused on sexual behavior and psychological issues. Yet to better understand the social and cultural dimensions of the disease, and to halt the spread of HIV, it is essential to recognize and understand the culture of MSM. Cultural anthropologists, unquestionably, are in a unique position to achieve this understanding. Douglas Feldman has gathered a diverse group of experts to contribute to this collection, and the volume features a wealth of scholarly data unavailable elsewhere. Douglas A. Feldman is professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Brockport. Awarded the AAA's Kimball Award in Public Anthropology in 1996 for his work exploring the connection between AIDS and anthropology, Feldman is the editor of five books, including "The AIDS Crisis: A Documentary History" and "AIDS, Culture, and Africa."

Given that women and girls carry the heaviest burdens of the African HIV pandemic, their lived experiences should be the starting point for any pedagogy of prevention. In light of this claim, Risky Marriage: HIV and Intimate Relationships in Tanzania uses qualitative fieldwork with HIV positive women living in Mwanza, Tanzania to ask why marriage is an HIV risk factor. By beginning with women's experience as a hermeneutical lens, this book seeks to establish a creative space where African women can imagine new alternatives to HIV prevention that would promote human flourishing and abundant life in African communities. The aim of this book is to listen faithfully to the lived experiences of HIV positive women and ask how their experiences can help us re-imagine Christian conceptions of marriage, sexual ethics, and health in an HIV positive world. By drawing on the unwritten texts of women's lives, this study proposes alternative pedagogies for faith-based prevention methods and contributes to the wider interdisciplinary and theo-ethical discourse on HIV prevention and women's health. At the same time, it makes local impact of equal importance as women in East African communities are invited to think creatively about ways to end the HIV pandemic. For more information and comments from the author, watch a trailer for the book here: http://vimeo.com/semafilms/riskymarriage

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa were once dismissed by Western experts as being too poor and chaotic to benefit from the antiretroviral drugs that transformed the AIDS epidemic in the United States and Europe. Today, however, the region is courted by some of the most prestigious research universities in the world as they search for resource-poor hospitals in which to base their international HIV research and global health programs. In Scrambling for Africa, Johanna Tayloe Crane reveals how, in the space of merely a decade, Africa went from being a continent largely excluded from advancements in HIV medicine to an area of central concern and knowledge production within the increasingly popular field of global health science.

Drawing on research conducted in the U.S. and Uganda during the mid-2000s, Crane provides a fascinating ethnographic account of the transnational flow of knowledge, politics, and research money as well as blood samples, viruses, and drugs. She takes readers to underfunded Ugandan HIV clinics as well as to laboratories and conference rooms in wealthy American cities like San Francisco and Seattle where American and Ugandan experts struggle to forge shared knowledge about the AIDS epidemic. The resulting uncomfortable mix of preventable suffering, humanitarian sentiment, and scientific ambition shows how global health research partnerships may paradoxically benefit from the very inequalities they aspire to redress. A work of outstanding interdisciplinary scholarship, Scrambling for Africa will be of interest to audiences in anthropology, science and technology studies, African studies, and the medical humanities."

This first extensive study of the practice of blood transfusion in Africa traces the history of one of the most important therapies in modern medicine from the period of colonial rule to independence and the AIDS epidemic. The introduction of transfusion held great promise for improving health, but like most new medical practices, transfusion needed to be adapted to the needs of sub-Saharan Africa, for which there was no analogous treatment in traditional African medicine.
This otherwise beneficent medical procedure also created a "royal road" for microorganisms, and thus played a central part in the emergence of human immune viruses in epidemic form. As with more developed health care systems, blood transfusion practices in sub-Saharan Africa were incapable of detecting the emergence of HIV. As a result, given the wide use of transfusion, it became an important pathway for the initial spread of AIDS. Yet African health officials were not without means to understand and respond to the new danger, thanks to forty years of experience and a framework of appreciating long-standing health risks. The response to this risk, detailed in this book, yields important insight into the history of epidemics and HIV/AIDS.
Drawing on research from colonial-era governments, European Red Cross societies, independent African governments, and directly from health officers themselves, this book is the only historical study of the practice of blood transfusion in Africa.

Looking back over the course of the three-plus decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, scholars and researchers have made many significant strides in understanding and responding to HIV and AIDS. From the inception of the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the early 1980s until the mid-1990s, when highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART) was introduced as an innovative and highly-effective way of controlling HIV and HIV-related diseases, the "average" person diagnosed as being HIV-positive could expect to live for several months and if lucky, for a few years. Today, with the medical advances that have been made in the fight against HIV/AIDS, people who have contracted HIV usually can expect to live relatively healthy lives, in most instances for many years without experiencing any serious complications of HIV disease. This book focuses on the social science aspects of current HIV research.

This publication is a multi-authored investigation into HIV reporting in South Africa, and combines journalism with research to present an analysis that is at once broad in its scope and focused on the important issues. What is left unsaid: Reporting the South African HIV epidemic is a collection of work produced by the fellows of the HIV/AIDS & the Media Project, started by Helen Struthers and Anton Harber in 2003. It contains a selection of the best journalism and research produced by the Media Project Fellows, which gives an important insight into the history and key issues of South African health politics and media reporting on HIV in the last decade. The texts range from in-depth quantitative and qualitative research documents to radio and television transcripts and candid interviews. The title's first section contains research and news reporting reflecting on how the media has reported HIV-related issues, while the second section consists of reporting on pertinent aspects of HIV: stigma, denial, disclosure; PMTCT; orphans and vulnerable children; abstinence and faithfulness; and traditional healers. Each half informs and elucidates the other and works to, as journalism should, shine a light on one the world's most pressing concerns, both at the grassroots and higher levels, and give a voice to those whose voices are often not heard against the din of political controversy that surrounds HIV.

This provocative study examines the role of today's Russian Orthodox Church in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Russia has one of the fastest-growing rates of HIV infection in the world - 80 per cent from intravenous drug use - and the Church remains its only resource for fighting these diseases. Jarrett Zigon takes the reader into a Church-run treatment center where, along with self-transformational and religious approaches, he explores broader anthropological questions - of morality, ethics, what constitutes a 'normal' life, and who defines it as such. Zigon argues that this rare Russian partnership between sacred and political power carries unintended consequences: even as the Church condemns the influence of globalization as the root of the problem it seeks to combat, its programs are cultivating citizen-subjects ready for self-governance and responsibility, and better attuned to a world the Church ultimately opposes.

The Republic of Therapy tells the story of the global response to the HIV epidemic from the perspective of community organizers, activists, and people living with HIV in West Africa. Drawing on his experiences as a physician and anthropologist in Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire, Vinh-Kim Nguyen focuses on the period between 1994, when effective antiretroviral treatments for HIV were discovered, and 2000, when the global health community acknowledged a right to treatment, making the drugs more available. During the intervening years, when antiretrovirals were scarce in Africa, triage decisions were made determining who would receive lifesaving treatment. Nguyen explains how those decisions altered social relations in West Africa. In 1994, anxious to "break the silence" and "put a face to the epidemic," international agencies unwittingly created a market in which stories about being HIV positive could be bartered for access to limited medical resources. Being able to talk about oneself became a matter of life or death. Tracing the cultural and political logic of triage back to colonial classification systems, Nguyen shows how it persists in contemporary attempts to design, fund, and implement mass treatment programs in the developing world. He argues that as an enactment of decisions about who may live, triage constitutes a partial, mobile form of sovereignty: what might be called therapeutic sovereignty.

The fight against HIV/AIDS is, above all, an economic issue. The scale of the pandemic and the lack of funds needed to eradicate it require identifying key issues in field interventions and optimal economic policies to fund them. In developing countries, where the epidemic is reaching its peak, the magnitude of governmental and international interventions triggers major crowding-out effects on every other economic decision of those countries, and thus HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of social life. Economic policies alleviating crowding-out effects are thus paramount to foster the economic growth of developing countries and, in turn, their future welfare. Economic issues in the fight against HIV/AIDS are also a primary concern for developed countries, in charge not only of subsidising current treatment campaigns domestically but also of funding R&D in innovative treatments. Designing optimal incentives for public and private agencies to reduce the costs of available medicines, and to develop innovative treatments such as a therapeutic vaccine, is as important as drug delivery or any other field campaign to eventually eradicate the disease. Over two decades of practical implementation of economic policies and academic research have shown many pitfalls in current policies, and they have made it possible to identify previously missed issues. This book shall provide a recent and comprehensive coverage of those policies, and it shall analyse their economic efficiency as well as ways of improvement using state-of-the-art academic findings in Economics and Finance. The authors discuss in detail and provide new economic analyses on the following issues: The nation-wide and international economic consequences of the spread of the disease; Market incentives and disincentives to produce and to develop treatment technologies; The nature and optimality of economic policies devoted to fighting the disease in developing countries, as well as the enhancement of current policies through financial innovations.

The first decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic was defined by young gay men dying and activism. The second decade saw people of colour and women account for the majority of those with HIV, as well as the development of effective drugs and the hope that HIV could become treatable or even curable. In this third decade, HIV has evolved into a chronic manageable disease. Few would have ever thought that there would be large numbers of older adults living with HIV in our lifetimes. Developing a strategy to best sustain the health and quality of life for the ageing population living with HIV requires a rigorous assessment of this group's characteristics and needs. Research on Older Adults with HIV (ROAH), conducted by the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA), is the first step to begin to establish a valid comprehensive knowledge-base of the unique characteristics and needs of this growing population.

This deeply insightful ethnography explores the healing power of caring and intimacy in a small, closely bonded Apostolic congregation during Botswana's HIV/AIDS pandemic. "Death in a Church of Life" paints a vivid picture of how members of the Baitshepi Church make strenuous efforts to sustain loving relationships amid widespread illness and death. Over the course of long-term fieldwork, Frederick Klaits discovered Baitshepi's distinctly maternal ethos and the 'spiritual' kinship embodied in the church's nurturing fellowship practice. Klaits shows that for Baitshepi members, Christian faith is a form of moral passion that counters practices of divination and witchcraft with redemptive hymn singing, prayer, and the use of therapeutic substances. An online audio annex makes available the examples of the church members' preachings and songs.

Changing the Course of AIDS is an in-depth evaluation of a new and exciting way to create the kind of much-needed behavioral change that could affect the course of the global health crisis of HIV/AIDS. This case study from the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic demonstrates that regular workers serving as peer educators can be as or even more effective agents of behavioral change than experts who lecture about the facts and so-called appropriate health care behavior.

After spending six years researching the response of large South African companies to the epidemic that is decimating their workforce as well as South African communities, David Dickinson describes the promise of this grassroots intervention workers educating one another in the workplace and community and the limitations of traditional top-down strategies. Dickinson's book takes us right into the South African workplace to show how effective and yet enormously complex peer education really is. We see what it means when workers directly tackle the kinds of sexual, gender, religious, ethnic, and broader social and political taboos that make behavior change so difficult, particularly when that behavior involves sex and sexuality.

Dickinson's findings show that people who are not officially health care experts or even health care workers can be skilled and effective educators. In this book we see why peer education has so much to offer societies grappling with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and why those interested in changing behaviors to ameliorate other health problems like obesity, alcoholism, and substance abuse have so much to learn from the South African example."

"Represents a long-overdue examination of anthropology's role in the fight against AIDS, bringing together the anthropological perspective and the problem of AIDS like no other."--Brian Joseph Gilley, University of Vermont Until now, there has been no one text that discusses the norms, beliefs, and behaviors that affect how societies respond to HIV/AIDS around the world. The Anthropology of AIDS synthesizes data from anthropology, psychology, sociology, biology, and medicine, and incorporates the author's more than two decades of work as a medical anthropologist, HIV test counselor, and sex therapist. Designed for use in a range of college courses, this volume combines a solid introduction to the epidemiology of HIV and AIDS with a wealth of material exploring the cross-cultural societal impact of the disease. Patricia Whelehan provides a broad overview of the epidemic since 1981, focusing on current social, cultural, political, and economic factors throughout the world. She brings a relativistic, comparative, and holistic approach to look at HIV/AIDS as both a pandemic and an intercultural health problem. She also explores the ethics and controversies surrounding HIV testing, treatment, and research in the United States and other specific societies, including Thailand, Brazil, and areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. Written in a clear, concise, and engaging tone, this timely and necessary text will prove an invaluable resource for instructors and undergraduates across many academic disciplines.

This groundbreaking work, with its unique anthropological approach, sheds new light on a central conundrum surrounding AIDS in Africa and in so doing, reframes current debates about the disease. Robert J. Thornton explores why HIV prevalence fell during the 1990s in Uganda despite that country's having one of Africa's highest fertility rates, while, during the same period, HIV prevalence rose in South Africa, a country with Africa's lowest fertility rate. Using anthropological, epidemiological, and mathematical methods, Thornton finds that culturally and socially determined differences in the structure of sexual networks - rather than changes in individual behavior - were responsible for these radical differences in HIV prevalence. His study exposes these invisible networks, or unimagined communities, unseen both by those who participate in them and by the social sciences, and opens a new area of investigation - the sexual network as social structure. Incorporating such factors as property, mobility, social status, and political authority into our understanding of AIDS transmission, Thornton offers a fresh vision of the disease, one that suggests new avenues for fighting it worldwide.

Reflecting the current state of research into the communication aspects of HIV/AIDS, this volume explores AIDS-related communication scholarship, moving forward from the 1992 publication AIDS: A Communication Perspective. Editors Timothy Edgar, Seth M. Noar, and Vicki S. Freimuth have developed this up-to-date collection to focus on today's key communication issues in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Chapters herein examine the interplay of the messages individuals receive about AIDS at the public level as well as the messages exchanged between individuals at the interpersonal level. Acknowledging how the face of HIV/AIDS has changed since 1992, the volume promotes the perspective that an understanding of effective communication through both mediated and interpersonal channels is essential to winning the continued battle against AIDS. Issues addressed here include: Social stigma associated with the disease, social support and those living with HIV/AIDS, and the current state of HIV testing Parent-child discussions surrounding HIV/AIDS and safer sexual behavior, and cultural sensitivity relating to developing HIV prevention and sex education programs The effectiveness of health campaigns to impact attitudes, norms, and behavior, as well as the current state of entertainment education and its ability to contribute to HIV prevention News media coverage of HIV/AIDS and the impact of the agenda-setting function on public opinion and policy making Health literacy and its importance to the health and well-being of those undergoing HIV treatment. The role of technological innovations, most notably the Internet, used for both prevention interventions as well as risky behavior The volume also includes exemplars that showcase the diversity of approaches to health communication used to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These cases include interpersonal and mass communication mediums; traditional along with new media and technology; research by academics and practitioners; individual as well as community-based approaches; work based in the United States and internationally; and campaigns directed at at-risk, HIV- positive, as well as general populations. With new topics, new contributors, and a broadened scope, this book goes beyond a revision of the 1992 volume to reflect the current state of communication research on HIV/AIDS across key contexts. It is designed for academics, researchers, practitioners, and students in health communication, health psychology, and other areas of AIDS research. As a unique examination of communication research, it makes an indelible contribution to the growing knowledge base of communication approaches to combating HIV/AIDS.

The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), is a disease of the body's immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). AIDS is characterised by the death of CD4 cells (an important part of the body's immune system), which leaves the body vulnerable to life-threatening conditions such as infections and cancers. This book explores how this deadly virus has affected America and high-risk children, and presents reports on different forms of funding provided by the international and United States governments, and the fluctuating rates of AIDS cases.