The co-discoverer of the AIDS virus tells his story of scientific discovery. Robert Gallo includes an epilogue in which he discusses the reasons for the similarity between the American and French HIV strains, the final report of the Office of Scientific Integrity, why the US government continues to reject French efforts to reopen the patent settlement, and, most important, where we stand today in regard to treatments that will slow down the progress of the disease in those already affected, and vaccines to prevent new infections.

Community based organizations assist participants in developing social skills and familiar language for negotiating and practicing safer, non-risky behaviors. AIDS education and awareness is best achieved in local community groups through the use of interactive group sharing and non-professional language. Supportive and informed mutual aid can be extended through community based organizations and can alleviate the psychological effects of isolation, homophobia, abandonment, and political disinterest created by society at large. AIDS therapy and prevention is best accomplished in settings that encourage one-to-one communication and compassion. The seventeen authors of this masterful compilation of AIDS research and policy make a strong case for community organizations as valiant warriors in one of this century's most threatening epidemics against humanity.

This is the story of ten courageous homosexuals suffering from AIDS, who volunteered for an extraordinary experiment, under the guidance of world-renowned macrobiotics expert Michio Kushi. The Way of Hope chronicles their miraculous experience, and provides AIDS sufferers and caregivers with detailed information about this drug-free, proven regimen.

The authors of The Essential AIDS Fact Book suggest ways to control the HIV virus while more effective treatments are being developed. Sections include HIV Antibody Testing; Obtaining Treatment; Health Care Strategies; Drugs that Help; Living with HIV; Managing Complications; and more.

This NIH-supported study of HIV's physical and psychosocial impacts offers both practical and inspiring accounts of how individuals living with HIV respond and cope with the disease and its progressive stages and impacts. The longitudinal approach of the research and the rich resources offered by extensive interviews with the persons with HIV and those closest to them avail the reader of insights and responses that should improve others' coping and caring abilities. The author's professional experience and extensive research informs the work throughout and fashions a remarkable and moving synthesis of the themes that will help those living with AIDS as well as all who relate to them. From the first awareness of infection to coping with bereavement, this book honestly, sensitively, and substantively addresses the essential concerns that any and all who are touched by the HIV pandemic must reflect on.

The seriousness, potential dimensions, and likely victims of the AIDS epidemic were known as early as 1981, yet the reaction of public and private organizations was shockingly slow and feeble and is even now woefully inadequate. Basing their analysis largely on the hardest hit city, New York, Charles Perrow and Mauro Guillen deliver a passionate, yet well-documented indictment of governmental and private groups for failing to provide the necessary education and care in response to this disaster. In this controversial book the authors describe the patterns of denial, avoidance, and segregation that various organizations exhibited toward the AIDS crisis and its victims. In so doing they extend our theories of organizational dynamics. It is well known that society has an aversion to the major groups threatened or afflicted with AIDS-male homosexuals and, more recently, intravenous drug users and their sexual partners-and that the poor and members of the minorities contribute most heavily to the ranks of the drug users. This situation, Perrow and Guillen argue, results in a stigma that makes AIDS unique among epidemics and contaminates the response of most organizations involved. Society's hostility toward the urban poor bears even more responsibility for the organizational mishandling of the crisis than the economic and ideological preoccupations of the Reagan era and the homophobia of lawmakers and establishment organizations. The second wave of the epidemic, affecting intravenous drug users, and through them, crack users, interacts fatally with growing problems of poverty in the inner cities, where homelessness, joblessness, rising tuberculosis and syphilis rates, crime, and the paucity of strong indigenous community agencies all foster the rapid spread of the disease. What is needed, the authors contend, is an all-out war on AIDS that attacks both sexual discrimination and poverty. The AIDS epidemic, they claim, presents an occasion for redressing long-standing social injustices.

Now! A macrobiotic, holistic regime, with no drugs or their inherent side-effects, that proves as effective as AZT in prolonging the lives of AIDS patients.

The search for a "patient zero" popularly understood to be the first infected case in an epidemic has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades. Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. How did this idea so swiftly come to exert such a strong grip on the scientific, media, and popular consciousness? In Patient Zero, Richard A. McKay interprets a wealth of archival sources and interviews to demonstrate how this seemingly new concept drew upon centuries-old ideas and fears about contagion and social disorder. McKay presents a carefully documented and sensitively written account of the life of Gaetan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the HIV/AIDS epidemic developed and who received widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as patient zero of the North American outbreak. McKay shows how investigators from the US Centers for Disease Control inadvertently created the term amid their early research into the emerging health crisis; how an ambitious journalist dramatically amplified the idea in his determination to reframe national debates about AIDS; and how many individuals grappled with the notion of patient zero adopting, challenging and redirecting its powerful meanings as they tried to make sense of and respond to the first fifteen years of an unfolding epidemic. With important insights for our interconnected age, Patient Zero untangles the complex process by which individuals and groups create meaning and allocate blame when faced with new disease threats. What McKay gives us here is myth-smashing revisionist history at its best.

Mema's house is in the poor quarter Nezahualcoyotl, a crowded urban space on the outskirts of Mexico City where people survive with the help of family, neighbours, and friends. This house is a sanctuary for a group of young homosexual men who meet to chat, flirt, listen to music, and smoke marijuana. Among the group are sex workers and transvestites with high heels, short skirts, heavy make-up, and voluminous hairstyles; and their partners, young, bisexual men, wearing T-shirts and worn jeans, short hair, and maybe a moustache. Mema, an AIDS educator and the leader of this gang of homosexual men, invited Annick Prieur, a European sociologist, to meet the community and conduct her fieldwork at his house. Prieur lived there for six months between 1988 and 1991, and she has kept in touch for more than eight years. As Prieur follows the transvestites in their daily activities - at their work as prostitutes or as hairdressers, at night having fun in the streets and in discos, on visits with their families and even in prisons, a story unfolds of love, violence, and deceit. Prieur analyzes the complicated relations between the effeminate homosexuals, most of them transvestites, and their partners, the masculine-looking bisexual men, asking why these particular gender constructions exist in the Mexican working classes, and how they can be so widespread in a male-dominated society, the very society from which the term "machismo" stems. Weaving empirical research with theory, Prieur presents new analytical angles on several concepts: family, class, domination, the role of the body, and the production of differences among men.

The hunt for the origin of the AIDS virus began over twenty years ago. It was a journey that went around the world and involved painstaking research to unravel how, when, and where the virus first infected humans. Dorothy H. Crawford traces the story back to the remote rain forests of Africa - home to the primates that carry the ancestral virus - and reveals how HIV-1 first jumped from chimpanzees to humans in rural south east Cameroon. Examining how this happened, and how it then travelled back to Colonial west central Africa where it eventually exploded as a pandemic, she asks why and how it was able to spread so widely. From hospital intensive care wards to research laboratories and the African rain forests, this is the wide-ranging story of a killer virus and a tale of scientific endeavour.

This book represents a body of work performed by students from a diverse set of disciplines and a variety of universities in the United States and Santiago, Chile. Each project was developed by the students to "break the cycle of social, economic and environmental health disparities". This book contains the projects from the eighth annual Break the Cycle' program. "Break the Cycle" projects are designed to raise awareness among the students of the reality of environmental health disparities and its impact on the world around them. Although students may feel daunted by the magnitude of the challenge, they need to know that even the relatively small project they develop can make a big difference and becomes part of an inexorable process towards making the world a better place for all of its citizens. The dictum that "It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, yet, you are not free to desist from it" empowers the students to take on a challenge for a lifetime and beyond. We believe that the lessons the students learned from their own projects, from working with the other students and from appreciating the difference that each little effort can make, goes significantly towards cultivating our future leaders; these are the people who will carry on the work and make the world a better place in their time.

This book incorporates works of empirical research, derived from different conceptual models based on psychological or psychosocial theory. It presents scientific studies on psychology, done principally by Spanish-speaking researchers from different countries, and tries to include the best academic efforts of research as an easy way of communication with non-Latin researchers.

AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) have complex health and societal determinants with large impacts. World-wide, the burden of these infectious diseases are huge, especially in the 22 countries with a high TB burden, where more than 80% of TB world-wide occurs and in sub-Saharan Africa, where 67% of the world's HIV/AIDS cases occurred. Despite different ways of transmission and the fact that several separate national programs often exist, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS are linked. They are often affecting similar population groups (e.g. vulnerable and other minorities groups) and HIV is the most potent risk factors in increasing the risk of progression from latent TB infection (LTBI) to disease among the two billions individuals estimated with LTBI world-wide, while the relative risk of HIV is over 20. Therefore, it is crucial to combine and co-ordinate the efforts when addressing TB and HIV issues. Diverse responses have been developed, both at international and country levels for tackling the different health and social components of these diseases.

Since the early days of the AIDS epidemic, many bizarre and dangerous hypotheses have been advanced as to the origins of the disease. In this compelling book, Nicoli Nattrass explores the social and political factors prolonging the erroneous belief that the American government manufactured the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to be used as a biological weapon, as well as the myth’s consequences for behavior, especially within African American and black South African communities.

Contemporary AIDS denialism, the belief that HIV is harmless and that antiretroviral drugs are the true cause of AIDS, is a more insidious AIDS conspiracy theory. Advocates of this position make a “conspiratorial move” against HIV science by implying its methods cannot be trusted, and that untested, alternative therapies are safer than antiretrovirals. These claims are genuinely life-threatening, as tragically demonstrated in South Africa when the delay of antiretroviral treatment resulted in nearly 333,000 AIDS deaths and 180,000 HIV infections thatcould have been prevented – a tragedy of stunning proportion.

Nattrass identifies four symbolically powerful figures ensuring the lifespan of AIDS denialism: the hero scientist (dissident scientists who lend credibility to the movement), the cultropreneur (alternative therapists who exploit the conspiratorial move as a marketing mechanism), the living icon (individuals who claim to be living proof of AIDS denialism’s legitimacy), and the praise-singer (journalists who broadcast movement messages to the public). Nattrass describes how pro-science activists have fought back by deploying empirical evidence and political credibility to resist AIDS conspiracy theories, which is part of the crucial project to defend evidence-based medicine.

Since 1984, the world has been spending, on the average, over $700 million annually in a futile effort at developing safe and effective HIV vaccines. During this period, over 25 million people have perished from the HIV/AIDS scourge, 90 per cent of them in the poor developing countries of sub-Saharan Africa. The socio-economic wreck caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic is mind-boggling. The years of wayward search for safe and effective HIV vaccines since 1984 should have shown the world that the recipe for HIV vaccines that they have been following religiously without success should be appraised. That has not been done up till today. Instead, the entire world has persisted with the unscientific, unreasonable, bizarre, and ridiculous dogmas and established knowledge. Globally, the world has deceitfully been made to believe that these vaccines, if ever they would be developed, are at least a decade away. The author expects this book to be of immense interest to all mankind especially international Institutions/Agencies like the UN, UNAIDS and WHO, Governments and their Health Ministries/Departments, the world's major or leading Pharmaceutical Companies, Universities/Research Institutes, leading media houses such as the CNN, the BBC, VOA, AFP and the CBS, virologists, HIV vaccine researchers and developers, medical practitioners and students, medical laboratory scientists and students, registered and student nurses, epidemiologists, ethicists, HIV-infected persons and all those that are involved or interested in HIV vaccine research and development.

A Reason to Live explores the human-animal relationship through the narratives of eleven people living with HIV and their animal companions. The narratives, based on a series of interviews with HIV-positive individuals and their animal companions in Australia, span the entirety of the HIV epidemic, from public awareness and discrimination in the 1980s and 1990s to survival and hope in the twenty-first century. Each narrative is explored within the context of theory (for example, attachment theory, the ""biophilia hypothesis,"" neurochemical and neurophysiological effects, laughter, play, death anxiety, and stigma) in order to understand the unique bond between human and animal during an ""epidemic of stigma."" A consistent theme is that these animals provided their human companions with ""a reason to live"" throughout the epidemic. Long-term survivors describe past animal companions who intuitively understood their needs and offered unconditional love and support during this turbulent period. More recently diagnosed HIV-positive narrators describe animal companions within the context of hope and the wellness narrative of living and aging with HIV in the twenty-first century. Bringing together these narratives offers insight into one aspect of the multifaceted HIV epidemic when human turned against human, and helps explain why it was frequently left to the animals to support their human companions. Importantly, it recognizes the enduring bond between human and animal within the context of theory and narrative, thus creating a cultural memory in a way that has never been done before.

"Sullivan offers [a] profound, often beautiful appreciation of friendship. . . . [He can] fascinate us with the range and depth of his mind."--San Francisco Chronicle

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year  

"One of the great pleasures of this book lies in watching Sullivan's mind at work . . . [his essays] are filled with a passion and heat that most cultural criticism lacks." --Katie Roiphe, The Washington Post

When former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan publicly revealed his HIV positive status in 1996, he intended "to be among the first generation that survives this disease." In this new book, a powerful meditation on the spiritual effect AIDS has on friendship, love, sexuality, and American culture, we follow Sullivan on his path to survival.  

A practicing Catholic, Sullivan reflects on his faith in God, and expresses his bittersweet joy upon learning about new AIDS treatments that he believes led to the virus's recent transformation from a plague into a chronic illness. He revisits Freud to seek the origins of homosexuality and reviews the works of Aristotle, St. Augustine, and W. H. Auden to define friendship for a contemporary, post-plague world. Sullivan's last essay extols the virtues of friendship, elevating platonic love over the romantic, as he memorializes his best friend, who died of AIDS.  Intensely personal and passionately political, Sullivan's essays are not just about his own experiences but also a powerful testament to human resilience, faith, hope, and love.  

"Sullivan has found meaning in chaos. . . . With its paradoxical sense of beauty amid pain, Love Undetectable has something of the quality of a war memoir."  --The New York Times Book Review  

"On display here are all of the author's many strengths--compelling, poetic prose style, some keen observations on faith. . . . Sullivan offers a moving defense of the open gay male urban sexual culture and his participation in it."  --The Boston Globe

Mema's house is in the poor barrio Nezahualcoyotl, a crowded urban space on the outskirts of Mexico City where people survive with the help of family, neighbors, and friends. This house is a sanctuary for a group of young, homosexual men who meet to do what they can't do openly at home. They chat, flirt, listen to music, and smoke marijuana. Among the group are sex workers and transvestites with high heels, short skirts, heavy make-up, and voluminous hairstyles; and their partners, young, bisexual men, wearing T-shirts and worn jeans, short hair, and maybe a mustache.
Mema, an AIDS educator and the leader of this gang of homosexual men, invited Annick Prieur, a European sociologist, to meet the community and to conduct her fieldwork at his house. Prieur lived there for six months between 1988 and 1991, and she has kept in touch for more than eight years. As Prieur follows the transvestites in their daily activities--at their work as prostitutes or as hairdressers, at night having fun in the streets and in discos--on visits with their families and even in prisons, a fascinating story unfolds of love, violence, and deceit.
She analyzes the complicated relations between the effeminate homosexuals, most of them transvestites, and their partners, the masculine-looking bisexual men, ultimately asking why these particular gender constructions exist in the Mexican working classes and how they can be so widespread in a male-dominated society--the very society from which the term "machismo" stems. Expertly weaving empirical research with theory, Prieur presents new analytical angles on several concepts: family, class, domination, the role of the body, and the production of differencesamong men.
A riveting account of heroes and moral dilemmas, community gossip and intrigue, "Mema's House, Mexico's City" offers a rich story of a hitherto unfamiliar culture and lifestyle.

The most important public health problem of our time-AIDS-is also the most shrouded in myth and misinformation. To bring the facts out of the shadows of fear and hysteria, the first edition of Mobilizing against AIDS was published in 1986. This new edition, nearly double the size of the first, interprets the results of the latest research on the disease and possible methods of treatment. For the foreseeable future the vast majority of AIDS cases will occur among groups that have already experienced major losses: homosexual and bisexual men, intravenous drug abusers, people who received blood or blood products before techniques were developed to safeguard the blood supply, heterosexual partners of those at recognized risk of HIV infection, and infants born to infected mothers. Mobilizing against AIDS examines new data on the growth of the epidemic within these groups, as well as on successful and failed attempts to stop the spread of the disease. In addition, it explores the growing problem of AIDS among the urban poor. This new edition also presents up to date information on how the disease affects the body, including damage to immune cells, bone marrow cells, skin cells, and cells of the cervix and colon. It contains additional discussions of treatment (particularly drug therapy and prospects for a vaccine) and a searching examination of the implications of societal and individual stress caused by the epidemic. In summarizing the events that have taken place in the last few years, Eve K. Nichols has worked closely with the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences and other key players in the battle against AIDS. Maintaining the clear and nontechnical style that has been so widely acclaimed, Nichols has forged an extraordinarily thorough synthesis that carries an authoritative stamp, ensuring that this new edition will be an indispensable resource for everyone concerned with AIDS and its treatment.

We Are Having This Conversation Now offers a history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. They establish multiple timelines of the epidemic, offering six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing how attention to the crisis has waxed and waned from the 1980s to the present. They begin the book with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, using it to consider organizing intersectionally, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video is one of many powerful yet overlooked objects that the pair focus on through conversation to understand HIV across time. Along the way, they share their own artwork, activism, and stories of the epidemic. Their conversations illuminate the vital role personal experience, community, cultural production, and connection play in the creation of AIDS-related knowledge, archives, and social change. Throughout, Juhasz and Kerr invite readers to reflect and find ways to engage in their own AIDS-related culture and conversation.

We Are Having This Conversation Now offers a history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. They establish multiple timelines of the epidemic, offering six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing how attention to the crisis has waxed and waned from the 1980s to the present. They begin the book with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, using it to consider organizing intersectionally, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video is one of many powerful yet overlooked objects that the pair focus on through conversation to understand HIV across time. Along the way, they share their own artwork, activism, and stories of the epidemic. Their conversations illuminate the vital role personal experience, community, cultural production, and connection play in the creation of AIDS-related knowledge, archives, and social change. Throughout, Juhasz and Kerr invite readers to reflect and find ways to engage in their own AIDS-related culture and conversation.

'I read the book in one go. I laughed and cried like a baby, and was transported back to a time of innocence, clouded by the enormity of the harsh reality . . . Just amazing' CATHERINE ZETA JONES 'As it happens, I was also a Jill in the eighties - but not half as good a Jill as real Jill' DAWN FRENCH 'Jill met the crisis head on . . . She held the hands of so many men. She lost them, and remembered them, and somehow kept going' RUSSELL T DAVIES A heartbreaking, life-affirming memoir of love, loss and cabaret through the AIDS crisis, from IT'S A SIN's Jill Nalder When Jill Nalder arrived at drama school in London in the early 1980s, she was ready for her life to begin. With her band of best friends - of which many were young, talented gay men with big dreams of their own - she grabbed London by the horns: partying with drag queens at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, hosting cabarets at her glamorous flat, flitting across town to any jobs she could get. But soon rumours were spreading from America about a frightening illness being dubbed the 'gay flu', and Jill and her friends now found their formerly carefree existence under threat. In this moving memoir, IT'S A SIN's Jill Nalder tells the true story of her and her friends' lives during the AIDS crisis -- juggling a busy West End career while campaigning for AIDS awareness and research, educating herself and caring for the sick. Most of all, she shines a light on those who were stigmatised and shamed, and remembers those brave and beautiful boys who were lost too soon. 'Thank God for people like [Jill] . . . I cannot recommend this book highly enough' MICHAEL BALL 'An engaging, moving account' TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW 'Simultaneously devastating and uplifting' GRAZIA 'Engrossing, heart-breaking and inspiring' MATT CAIN