AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of "crisis" structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced. Among other topics, the authors examine the writing of the history of AIDS; settler colonial narratives and laws impacting risk in Indigenous communities; the early internet regulation of both content and online AIDS activism; the Black gendered and sexual politics of pleasure, desire, and (in)visibility; and how persistent attention to white men has shaped AIDS as intrinsic to multiple, unremarkable crises among people of color and in the Global South. Contributors. Cecilia Aldarondo, Pablo Alvarez, Marlon M. Bailey, Emily Bass, Darius Bost, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Jih-Fei Cheng, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Roger Hallas, Pato Hebert, Jim Hubbard, Andrew J. Jolivette, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, Alexandra Juhasz, Dredge Byung'chu Kang-Nguyen, Theodore (Ted) Kerr, Catherine Yuk-ping Lo, Cait McKinney, Viviane Namaste, Elton Naswood, Cindy Patton, Margaret Rhee, Juana Maria Rodriguez, Sarah Schulman, Nishant Shahani, C. Riley Snorton, Eric A. Stanley, Jessica Whitbread, Quito Ziegler

The AIDS epidemic has spread worldwide, and nearly 300,000 cases have been reported in the United States alone. Statisticians and epidemiologists are called upon to design and correctly interpret studies on the prevention and control of disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and to estimate the magnitude and future course of the epidemic. In addition to a comprehensive discussion of methods for gauging the extent of the epidemic and forecasting AIDS incidence, this book presents methods and results concerning the risks of HIV transmission, the incubation period of HIV infection, markers of disease progression, prevention strategies, including strategies to protect the blood supply, and the evaluation of treatments and vaccines. These topics are presented quantitatively, with an emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of available data. The book highlights how a naive statistical approach to the design or analysis of such studies can lead to seriously misleading results. The various methods of monitoring and forecasting HIV disease and AIDS incidence are given thorough treatment. These methods include back-calculation, which the authors developed; interpretations of survey data on HIV prevalence and incidence; mathematical models for HIV transmission; and approaches that combine different types of epidemiological data. Much of the material in this book - such as a discussion of methods for assessing safety of the blood supply. an evaluation of survey approaches and methods to project pediatric AIDS incidence - has not been previously published.

Information forms the basis for education, and currently education is the only weapon available to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS and to foster empathy toward individuals already affected by the disease. HIV/AIDS and Community Information Services provides readers with insight into the information construct within the AIDS arena and how that construct affects the provision of information services to the HIV/AIDS affected population. It will serve as an irreplaceable reference as the number of individuals with AIDS increases, creating a greater demand for information and making that information increasingly difficult to provide.While directories exist to assist with practical approaches to accessing HIV/AIDS-related information, none had served as a comprehensive resource concerning the nature of that information or the provision of information services. HIV/AIDS Community Information Services fills that void. It fosters the enlightenment of the general public concerning the true nature of HIV/AIDS, guides readers in providing information services--both educational and recreational--to individuals affected by HIV/AIDS, and encourages the dissemination of instructional materials to those individuals at risk for infection. In doing so, contributors provide readers with information about: the relationship between AIDS and the body of information concerning the disease the complex nature of HIV/AIDS-related information available HIV/AIDS information services information as a means for empowerment suggestions for future programs, potential collaboration efforts, and innovative servicesAn essential guide for information professionals, librarians, health educators, counselors, members of community-based AIDS service organizations, and individuals affected by HIV/AIDS, HIV/AIDS Community Information Services foster the creation, accession, collection, organization, dissemination, and sharing of information concerning the HIV/AIDS epidemic and promotes the provision of services to individuals already affected by HIV/AIDS.

Over the past two decades, the epidemic of HIV/AIDS has challenged the public health community to fundamentally rethink the framework for preventing infectious diseases. While much progress has been made on the biomedical front in treatments for HIV infection, prevention still relies on behaviour change. This book documents and explains the remarkable breakthroughs in behavioural research design that have emerged to confront this new challenge: the study of partnership networks. Traditionally, public health research focused on the "knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP)" of individuals, an approach designed for understanding health-related behaviour like seat-belt wearing and cigarette smoking. For HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, however, there are at least two people involved in transmission. This may not seem like a big difference, but in fact it changes everything. First, it means that your risk depends on your partners - and on their partners, and their partners: it depends on your position in the network of partnerships. Consider, for example, the rise of infections among monogamous women. Second, it means that individuals are not free to simply change their behaviour - condom use, or abstinence, needs to be negotiated with a partner. both the epidemiology of risk and constraints to behaviour are therefore a function of the partnership network. And our ability to design effective prevention strategies depends on our ability to measure and summarize that network. Using the traditional research designs, you would not see this network at all - you would only see the unconnected nodes. They key to solving this problem lies in Network Analysis, before now a relatively obscure subfield in Sociology. For empirical studies of networks to become feasible, however, many problems had to be solved. This book documents the rapid progress that has been made. It brings together eight pioneering studies that have sought to map the networks that spread infection around the world. Each chapter reviews the questions that drove the study, the changes in methodology that were needed to implement the network survey, the mistakes and successes encountered, and the central findings that the network design made possible. An introduction provides an overview of network survey design, a glossary provides a summary of network terminology, and example questionnaires from each study provide a template for further research. This is a unique and valuable resource for the international public health research community.

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.

Peter Piot, founding executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), recounts his experience as a clinician, scientist, and activist fighting the disease from its earliest manifestation to today. The AIDS pandemic was not only disruptive to the health of millions worldwide but also fractured international relations, global access to new technologies, and public health policies in nations across the globe. As he struggled to get ahead of the disease, Piot found science does little good when it operates independently of politics and economics, and politics is worthless if it rejects scientific evidence and respect for human rights.

Piot describes how the epidemic altered global attitudes toward sexuality, the character of the doctor-patient relationship, the influence of civil society in international relations, and traditional partisan divides. AIDS thrust health into national and international politics where, he argues, it rightly belongs. The global reaction to AIDS over the past decade is the positive result of this partnership, showing what can be acheved when science, politics, and policy converge on the ground. Yet it remains a fragile achievement, and Piot warns against complacency and the consequences of reduced investments. He refuses to accept a world in which high levels of HIV infection are the norm. Instead, he explains how to continue to reduce the incidence of the disease to minute levels through both prevention and treatment, until a vaccine is discovered.

Critical health communication scholars point out that the acceptance of HIV risk prevention methods are bound inside inequitable structures of power and knowledge. Nicola Bulled's in-depth ethnographic account of how these messages are selected, transmitted and reacted to by young adults in the AIDS-torn population of Lesotho in southern Africa provides a crucial example of the importance of a culture-centered approach to health communication. She shows the clash between traditional western perceptions of how increased knowledge will increase compliance with western ideas of prevention, and mixed messages offered by local religious, educational, and media institutions. Bulled also demonstrates how structural and geographical forces prevent the delivery and acceptance of health messages, and how local communities shape their own knowledge of health, disease and illness. This volume will be of interest to medical anthropologists and sociologists, to those in health communication, and to researchers working on issues related to HIV.

As the HIV epidemic moves into its fourth decade, it is clear that the global response has failed to adequately address the needs of a wide range of vulnerable populations and groups. Chief among these are gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, and transgender persons, who globally face the disproportional burden of HIV infection. This volume rethinks HIV prevention and health promotion for sexual and gender minorities - in both the industrialised societies of the West, as well as in the developing nations of the Global South. The chapters it contains offer a critical analysis of past and present HIV research employing categories to designate gay and other men who have sex with men, transgender persons, and/or other persons and communities with diverse gender and sexual identities. Contributors question the politics of many of the existing classifications and categories in HIV research and argue for a more sophisticated analysis of gender and sexual diversity in order to tackle the social and political barriers that impede the design of successful HIV prevention and health promotion approaches. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Public Health.

Originally published in 1998 Sexual Behaviour and HIV/AIDS in Europe is detailed study comparing the major population surveys on sexual behaviour and HIV/AIDS carried out in Europe at the time of publication. Leading European researchers explore the differences and similarities between European countries in patterns of sexual behaviour and responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As well as providing an empirical and methodological base for future research, the comparative analyses lead researchers, policy makers, health-educators and the media to new insights and a deeper understanding of issues that are of central concern in many countries. The chapters include discussion of data on sexual initiation, homosexual and bisexual behaviour, sexual practices, sexual partners, risk behaviour, STDs, preventive practices, the normative context, knowledge of HIV/AIDS, and attitudes towards people with HIV/AIDS. The book results from a major European Concerted Action, funded by the European Union Biomedical and Health Research programme (BIOMED), and coordinated by the Centre d'Etudes Sociologiques of the Facultes Universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels, Belgium. It follows Sexual Interactions and HIV Risk, published in 1997.

Health of HIV Infected People: Food, Nutrition and Lifestyle with Antiretroviral Drugs provides basic and applied knowledge on the supportive roles of bioactive foods, exercise, and dietary supplements on HIV/AIDS patients receiving antiretroviral drugs. Approaches include the application of traditional herbs and foods aiming to define both the risks and benefits of such practices. Readers will learn how to treat or ameliorate the effects of chronic retroviral disease using readily available, cheap foods, dietary supplements, and lifestyle changes with specific attention to the needs of patients receiving antiretroviral drugs. This work provides the most current, concise, scientific appraisal of the efficacy (or lack thereof) of key foods, nutrients, dietary plants, and behavioral shifts in preventing and improving the quality of life of HIV infected infants and adults, while also giving the needed attention to these complex and important side effects.

Brazil has occupied a central role in the access to medicines movement, especially with respect to drugs used to treat those with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). How and why Brazil succeeded in overcoming powerful political and economic interests, both at home and abroad, to roll-out and sustain treatment represents an intellectual puzzle. In this book, Matthew Flynn traces the numerous challenges Brazil faced in its efforts to provide essential medicines to all of its citizens. Using dependency theory, state theory, and moral underpinnings of markets, Flynn delves deeper into the salient factors contributing to Brazil's successes and weaknesses, including control over technology, creation of political alliances, and instrumental use of normative frameworks and effectively explains the ability of countries to fulfill the prescription drug needs of its population versus the interests and operations of the global pharmaceutical industry Pharmaceutical Autonomy and Public Health in Latin America is one of the only books to provide an in-depth account of the challenges that a developing country, like Brazil, faces to fulfill public health objectives amidst increasing global economic integration and new international trade agreements. Scholars interested in public health issues, HIV/AIDS, and human rights, but also to social scientists interested in Latin America and international political economy will find this an original and thought provoking read.

In the year 2000 the World Health Organization estimated that 85 percent of fifteen-year-olds in Botswana would eventually die of AIDS. In Saturday Is for Funerals we learn why that won't happen.

Unity Dow and Max Essex tell the true story of lives ravaged by AIDS of orphans, bereaved parents, and widows; of families who devote most Saturdays to the burial of relatives and friends. We witness the actions of community leaders, medical professionals, research scientists, and educators of all types to see how an unprecedented epidemic of death and destruction is being stopped in its tracks.

This book describes how a country responded in a time of crisis. In the true-life stories of loss and quiet heroism, activism and scientific initiatives, we learn of new techniques that dramatically reduce rates of transmission from mother to child, new therapies that can save lives of many infected with AIDS, and intricate knowledge about the spread of HIV, as well as issues of confidentiality, distributive justice, and human rights. The experiences of Botswana offer practical lessons along with the critical element of hope.

The AIDS crisis reshaped life in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s and radicalized a new generation of queer Asian Americans with a broad vision of health equity and sexual freedom. Even amid the fear and grief, Asian American AIDS activists created an infrastructure of care that centered the most stigmatized and provided diverse immigrant communities with the health resources and information they needed. Without a formal blueprint, these young organizers often had to be creative and agitational, and together they reclaimed the pleasure in sex and fostered inclusivity, regardless of HIV status. A community memoir, Love Your Asian Body connects the deeply personal with the uncompromisingly political in telling the stories of more than thirty Asian American AIDS activists. In those early years of the epidemic, these activists became caregivers, social workers, nurses, researchers, and advocates for those living with HIV. And for many, the AIDS epidemic sparked the beginning of their continued work to build multiracial coalitions and confront broader systemic inequities. Detailing the intertwined realities of race and sexuality in AIDS activism, Love Your Asian Body offers a vital portrait of a movement founded on joy.

Paula A. Treichler has become a singularly important voice among the significant theorists on the AIDS crisis. Dissecting the cultural politics surrounding representations of HIV and AIDS, her work has altered the field of cultural studies by establishing medicine as a legitimate focus for cultural analysis. "How to Have Theory in an Epidemic" is a comprehensive collection of Treichler's related writings, including revised and updated essays from the 1980s and 1990s that present a sustained argument about the AIDS epidemic from a uniquely knowledgeable and interdisciplinary standpoint.
"AIDS is more than an epidemic disease," Treichler writes, "it is an epidemic of meanings." Exploring how such meanings originate, proliferate, and take hold, her essays investigate how certain interpretations of the epidemic dominate while others are obscured. They also suggest ways to understand and choose between overlapping or competing discourses. In her coverage of roughly fifteen years of the AIDS epidemic, Treichler addresses a range of key issues, from biomedical discourse and theories of pathogenesis to the mainstream media's depictions of the crisis in both developed and developing countries. She also examines representations of women and AIDS, treatment issues, and the role of activism in shaping the politics of the epidemic. Linking the AIDS tragedy to a uniquely broad spectrum of contemporary theory and culture, this collection concludes with an essay on the continued importance of theoretical thought for untangling the sociocultural phenomena of AIDS--and for tackling the disease itself.
With an exhaustive bibliography of critical and theoretical writings on HIV and AIDS, this long-awaited volume will be essential to all those invested in studying the course of AIDS, its devastating medical effects, and its massive impact on contemporary culture. It should become a standard text in university courses dealing with AIDS in biomedicine, sociology, anthropology, gay and lesbian studies, women's studies, and cultural and media studies.

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This book argues that the AIDS pandemic is an international security issue because of its impact on the armed forces in Africa, and because of the growing social, political, and economic challenges that it is generating for state stability in the worst affected countries. The international community must devote more resources and more sustained efforts towards addressing the global AIDS pandemic.

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of "crisis" structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced. Among other topics, the authors examine the writing of the history of AIDS; settler colonial narratives and laws impacting risk in Indigenous communities; the early internet regulation of both content and online AIDS activism; the Black gendered and sexual politics of pleasure, desire, and (in)visibility; and how persistent attention to white men has shaped AIDS as intrinsic to multiple, unremarkable crises among people of color and in the Global South. Contributors. Cecilia Aldarondo, Pablo Alvarez, Marlon M. Bailey, Emily Bass, Darius Bost, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Jih-Fei Cheng, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Roger Hallas, Pato Hebert, Jim Hubbard, Andrew J. Jolivette, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, Alexandra Juhasz, Dredge Byung'chu Kang-Nguyen, Theodore (Ted) Kerr, Catherine Yuk-ping Lo, Cait McKinney, Viviane Namaste, Elton Naswood, Cindy Patton, Margaret Rhee, Juana Maria Rodriguez, Sarah Schulman, Nishant Shahani, C. Riley Snorton, Eric A. Stanley, Jessica Whitbread, Quito Ziegler

Based on research by a leading geographer and specialist in diffusion theory, The Slow Plague discloses the geographic dimension of the AIDS pandemic. It provides a lucid description of the HIV, its origins, and the extent to which it has now permeated our lives. The author shows how the virus jumps from city to city, creating regional epicenters from which it spreads into surrounding areas.

Four case studies at different geographic scales demonstrate the devastating effects of the disease. In Africa the situation is catastrophic, in Thailand it is rapidly becoming so. In the US there are over 300,000 people with AIDS and more than one million infected by the HIV. The relationships between poverty, drugs and HIV infection are brought out poignantly in a chapter about the Bronx.

The author argues that a real understanding of AIDS has been hampered by conscious or unconscious beliefs that those affected are, and will continue to be, confined to specific minority groups and to parts of the Third World. He shows that such views have led to fundamental misconceptions about the pattern of the spread of the disease and about those who will be most at risk, now and in the immediate future.

The care paradigm for people with HIV has shifted from managing progressive illness with a poor prognosis to managing a chronic condition. Despite this improvement, people living with HIV continue to experience considerable stresses, so promoting their holistic wellbeing is a key aspect of long-term care. This book provides an accessible introduction for healthcare professionals who work with people living with HIV. It is designed to help readers understand how care in practice can be more person-centred and psychologically focused, whilst promoting compassion, health and wellbeing. Topics covered include self-awareness, attachment theories and communication as well as key aspects of providing care for people living with HIV, such as stigma in young adults, neurocognitive issues, the sexualized use of drugs, managing neuropathic pain, and the needs of older adults living with HIV. Invaluable reading for health professionals working within multidisciplinary teams that provide care for people living with HIV, this book is also a core text for those studying in the area.

In 1992, Dr. Ross A. Slotten had the dubious distinction of signing more death certificates in the city of Chicago--and, by inference, the state of Illinois--than any other physician. As a family physician, he trained to care for patients from birth to death, but when he completed his residency in 1984, he had no idea that many of his future patients would be cut down in the prime of their lives. Among those patients were close friends, colleagues, and former lovers, who were shunned by most of the medical community because of their sexual orientation and HIV-positive status. Slotten wasn't an infectious disease specialist, but because of his unique position as a gay man and a young physician, he became an unlikely pioneer, swept up in the maelstrom of one of the greatest epidemics in modern human history. In Plague Years, Slotten offers a unique first-person account of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, drawing from private journals and notes from his thirty-plus years of practice. Spanning not just the city of Chicago, but four continents as well, Plague Years provides a comprehensive portrait of the epidemic, from its mystery-riddled early years through the reckless governmental responses of the United States and other nations that led to legions of senseless deaths and ruined lives to the discoveries of life-saving drug cocktails that transformed the disease into something potentially manageable. Unlike most other books on the subject, Slotten's story extends to the present day, when prevention of infection for those at risk and successful treatment of those already infected offer a ray of hope that HIV/AIDS can be stopped in its tracks. Alternating between Slotten's reactions to the crisis as a gay man and the demanding toll the disease took on his career and the world around him, Plague Years sheds light on some of the darkest hours in the history of the LGBT community in a way that no previous medical memoir has.

Living with HIV: A Patient's Guide, Second Edition builds on the success of the first edition by updating and adding critical information that will help the newly diagnosed adjust to their illness and the long-term survivor improve their life and supplement their foundation of HIV knowledge. In addition, new and useful topics have been added including the most complete medication information for even the latest medications to hit the market. The book discusses the growing practice of using HIV medication as a prevention method; PrEP as it is commonly called. Finally, there is essential information needed by those people living with HIV that use the wealth of information on the Internet to help them live a longer, healthier life. The second edition is written in an easy to understand, clear-cut style that makes it easy for anyone; from the long-term patient to the newly infected; to understand what it takes to live a healthy life with HIV.

"Adelman and Frey take advantage of every opportunity to leave their audience with a splendid reading experience that will prompt one to think about community and communication in new and exciting ways. And as it should be, the reader also will not soon forget the echoes of the voices of the ordinary, but remarkable, men and women who inspired the work -- the residents who live and have lived in the fragile community at BH". -- Journal of Health Communication

This book examines the concept of "community", focusing on how communication practices help manage the tensions of creating and sustaining everyday communal life amidst the crisis of human loss. While acknowledging how the contradictory and inconsistent nature of human relationships inevitably affects community, this intimate and compelling text shows how community is created and sustained in concrete communication practices.

The authors explore these ideas at Bonaventure House, an award-winning residential facility for people with AIDS, where the web of social relationships and the demands of a life-threatening illness intersect in complex ways. Facing a life-threatening illness can defy meaningful social connections, but it can also inspire such ties, sometimes in ways that elude us in the course of daily life. By understanding how collective communication practices help residents forge a sense of community out of the fragility and chaos f living together with AIDS, we are able to better understand how communication is inexorably intertwined with the formation of community in other environments.

Based on seven years of ethnographic research including participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and questionnaires, thisbook weaves together narratives and visual images with conceptual analysis to uncover the ongoing oppositional forces of community life, and to show how both mundane and profound communication processes ameliorate these tensions, and thereby sustain this fragile community. Because the average length of stay for a resident is seven months -- in which time he or she moves from being a newcomer to a community member to someone the community remembers -- the text reflects this short, but crystallized life, starting with the day a new resident opens the door to the day he or she passes away.

The writing is very rich -- intimate, engaging, personal, compelling, and vivid. The stories told discuss such deeply personal topics as the dilemmas of romantic relationships in a context fraught with many perils; issues of power, authority, and control that enable and constrain social life; and communicative practices that help residents cope with bereavement over the loss of others as well as their own impending deaths. The text concludes by examining the lessons learned from Bonaventure House about creating and sustaining a health community, and serves as an inspiration for strengthening interpersonal relationships and communities in other environments.

In Close To The Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays -- a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America."

From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation -- Close To The Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir.

Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

Approximately eight percent of our DNA contains retroviral sequences that are millions of years old. Through engaging stories of scientific discovery, Anna Marie Skalka explains our evolving knowledge of these ancient denizens of the biosphere and how this understanding has significantly advanced research in genetic engineering, gene delivery systems, and precision medicine. Discovering Retroviruses begins with the pioneer scientists who first encountered these RNA-containing viruses and solved the mystery of their reproduction. Like other viruses, retroviruses invade the cells of a host organism to reproduce. What makes them "retro" is a unique process of genetic information transfer. Instead of transcribing DNA into RNA as all living cells do, they transcribe their RNA into DNA. This viral DNA is then spliced into the host's genome, where the cell's synthetic machinery is co-opted to make new virus particles. The 100,000 pieces of retroviral DNA in the human genome are remnants from multiple invasions of our ancestors' "germline" cells-the cells that allow a host organism to reproduce. Most of these bits of retroviral DNA are degenerated fossils, but some have been exploited during evolution, with profound effects on our physiology. Some present-day circulating retroviruses cause cancers in humans and other animals. Others, like HIV, cause severe immunodeficiencies. But retroviruses also hold clues to innovative approaches that can prevent and treat these diseases. In laboratories around the world, retroviruses continue to shed light on future possibilities that are anything but "retro."