The title of this book is taken from Albert Camus, who wrote, "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." Indeed, the AIDS epidemic has hit like a cold blizzard in the gay community and in inner cities afflicted by high levels of drug abuse. In the Midst of Winter chronicles the brave struggles of families, couples, and individuals caught in that storm and speaks to their strengths, as well as to those of their therapists, even in the bleakest of circumstances. Powerful and practical, immediate and inspiring, it shows the way through the storm to the "invincible summer."

Camcorder AIDS activism is a prime example of a new form of political expression--an outburst of committed, low-budget, community-produced, political video work made possible by new accessible technologies. As Alexandra Juhasz looks at this phenomenon--why and how video has become the medium for so much AIDS activism--she also tries to make sense of the bigger picture: How is this work different from mainstream television? How does it alter what we think of the media's form and function? The result is an eloquent and vital assessment of the role media activism plays in the development of community identity and self-empowerment.
An AIDS videomaker herself, Juhasz writes from the standpoint of an AIDS activist and blends feminist film critique with her own experience. She offers a detailed description of alternative AIDS video, including her own work on the Women's AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE). Along with WAVE, Juhasz discusses amateur video tapes of ACT UP demonstrations, safer sex videos produced by Gay Men's Health Crisis, public access programming, and PBS documentaries, as well as network television productions.
From its close-up look at camcorder AIDS activism to its critical account of mainstream representations, AIDS TV offers a better understanding of the media, politics, identity, and community in the face of AIDS. It will challenge and encourage those who hope to change the course of this crisis both in the 'real world' and in the world of representation.

In this broad-ranging book, Michael Bloor gives an overview of our current understanding of the social conditions and contexts of HIV transmission. The author examines the social epidemiology of HIV transmission in its different manifestations in the developing world and in the West, looking at heterosexual and homosexual transmission, sex tourism and prostitution, injecting drug users, haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients. He goes on to look at reports of sociological studies of risk behaviour among men who have sex with men, among heterosexual and bisexual men and women, and among those who share syringes. Drawing on his own research, Michael Bloor presents a critical examination of the different theoretical models of risk and considers their implications for disease prevention.

The treatment of HIV is perhaps the most demanding and complex aspect of work for today's health care provider. Often the first decision providers and patients make is whether or not to test for the virus; this is only the first in a series of involved--and often troubling--decisions confronting both provider and patient. HIV Care considers many of the diverse elements affecting and affected by this illness, from its physical and neuropsychological manifestations to its legal and financial implications. Addressing concerns about HIV testing, the authors introduce a practical risk assessment tool and discuss some of the subjects and approaches germane to pre- and posttest counseling. Medical management is surveyed, exploring not only traditional therapies but experimental and complementary ones such as acupuncture, exercise, and diet. The psychological, psychosocial, and spiritual impacts of HIV are also considered, often generating conflicting perspectives. Finally, pragmatic issues including housing and home care, financial assistance, and legal issues pertaining to the counseling of HIV-positive patients are presented. Appendixes record laws related to HIV by state, catalog available legal assistance, and list state and national resources for HIV patients. Offering a thorough look at the most recent developments in HIV treatment, this handbook will serve as a powerful reference guide for practitioners in primary care, nursing, and public health, or anyone working with HIV patients. "The authors have compiled an extremely useful and easy-to-use handbook that should be on the desk of all primary care providers who treat HIV-positive individuals. Of particular interest are the legal issues where the state laws for each state are outlined concerning reporting, informed consent, confidentiality, affirmative duty to disclose, quarantine, mandatory testing, and transmission crime. This is a highly recommended book for all medical, public, and academic libraries; but especially for the professional primary care provider. It answers many questions for those who have not had the years of experience of dealing with HIV-positive patients." --AIDS Book Review Journal

The treatment of HIV is perhaps the most demanding and complex aspect of work for today's health care provider. Often the first decision providers and patients make is whether or not to test for the virus; this is only the first in a series of involved--and often troubling--decisions confronting both provider and patient. HIV Care considers many of the diverse elements affecting and affected by this illness, from its physical and neuropsychological manifestations to its legal and financial implications. Addressing concerns about HIV testing, the authors introduce a practical risk assessment tool and discuss some of the subjects and approaches germane to pre- and posttest counseling. Medical management is surveyed, exploring not only traditional therapies but experimental and complementary ones such as acupuncture, exercise, and diet. The psychological, psychosocial, and spiritual impacts of HIV are also considered, often generating conflicting perspectives. Finally, pragmatic issues including housing and home care, financial assistance, and legal issues pertaining to the counseling of HIV-positive patients are presented. Appendixes record laws related to HIV by state, catalog available legal assistance, and list state and national resources for HIV patients. Offering a thorough look at the most recent developments in HIV treatment, this handbook will serve as a powerful reference guide for practitioners in primary care, nursing, and public health, or anyone working with HIV patients. "The authors have compiled an extremely useful and easy-to-use handbook that should be on the desk of all primary care providers who treat HIV-positive individuals. Of particular interest are the legal issues where the state laws for each state are outlined concerning reporting, informed consent, confidentiality, affirmative duty to disclose, quarantine, mandatory testing, and transmission crime. This is a highly recommended book for all medical, public, and academic libraries; but especially for the professional primary care provider. It answers many questions for those who have not had the years of experience of dealing with HIV-positive patients." --AIDS Book Review Journal

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.

The AIDS epidemic has touched the lives of all Americans. An entire generation has been forced to redefine the way it looks at intimacy. Our very images of ourselves are being altered in the wake of this tragic illness. Yet we are only now beginning to discover the true extent of the change AIDS has wrought on American society. This massive challenge to public health is creating a fault line beneath our institutions, threatening to undermine much that we have taken for granted about the pillars of our culture. Looking out across the landscape of AIDS, we sense a fundamental shift in the way we think about ourselves, about others, and about government. Shattered Mirrors is a deeply moving meditation on the impact AIDS is having on American consciousness. AIDS has become a moral lesson for our nation, Monroe Price argues, but not the narrow lesson about the dangers of deviancy that certain segments of society have professed. The AIDS epidemic challenges some of our most cherished ideas about individual autonomy, free expression, fairness, and confidence in the future. As this book points out, the ultimate legacy of the AIDS epidemic is far more than its terrible impact on the health of the citizenry. As the disease grinds on, several traditional barriers between church and state, government and the media, citizen and consumer have begun to erode, while other barriers of class, race, and lifestyle are growing larger. It is too early to say whether these and similar changes will be permanent, but as long as there is uncertainty about how devastating AIDS will prove to be to our society, we will continue to debate its meaning and how we should respond to the threat it poses to all of us. In the long run, Price maintains, AIDS may force us to reexamine the role government should play in shaping our personal lives. More than this, it may well oblige us to redefine what we mean by identity and community in a democracy under siege.

AIDS is unquestionably the most serious threat to public health in this century--yet how effective has the United States been in coping with this deadly disease? This sobering analysis of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic reveals the failure of traditional approaches in recognizing and managing this health emergency; it is an extremely unsettling probe into what makes the nation ill equipped to handle a crisis of the magnitude of the one that now confronts us.

Sandra Panem pays particular attention to the Public Health Service, within which the vast majority of biomedical research and public health services are organized, including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. We learn in dismaying detail how shortcomings in communication within and among the many layers of the health establishment delayed management of the crisis.

She also investigates other problems that surface during a health emergency, involving issues such as federal budgeting, partisan politics, bureaucratic bungles, educating the public, the complications of policymaking, and the vexing role of the press. Panem makes specific recommendations for a centrally coordinated federal response to health emergencies, including the creation of a national health emergency plan.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2007

"The Invisible Cure" is an account of Africa's AIDS epidemic from the inside--a revelatory dispatch from the intersection of village life, government intervention, and international aid. Helen Epstein left her job in the US in 1993 to move to Uganda, where she began work on a test vaccine for HIV. Once there, she met patients, doctors, politicians, and aid workers, and began exploring the problem of AIDS in Africa through the lenses of medicine, politics, economics, and sociology. Amid the catastrophic failure to reverse the epidemic, she discovered a village-based solution that could prove more effective than any network of government intervention and international aid, an intuitive response that calls into question many of the fundamental assumptions about the AIDS in Africa.

Written with conviction, knowledge, and insight, "The Invisible Cure" will change how we think about the worst health crisis of the past century--and indeed about every issue of global public health.

This work includes a foreword by Jeffrey Koplan, Vice President, Academic Health Affairs, Emory University, Atlanta, Formerly Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This groundbreaking new book blows apart the myths about who is at risk of getting AIDS and shows how these myths are driven by moral and political pressures. It provides an objective, logical, clear, epidemiologically based analysis on the current situation and situates itself firmly at marked variance with the politically correct position of UNAIDS and most AIDS activists. "The AIDS Pandemic" argues that the story of HIV has been distorted by UNAIDS and AIDS activists in order to support the myth of the high potential risk of HIV epidemics spreading into the general population. In the past, most policy makers and members of the public have uncritically accepted UNAIDS' high prevalence estimates and projections when in fact lower HIV prevalence estimates are more accurate. Time, money and resources are being wasted worldwide. This book is full of fresh analysis for all people working in any capacity in HIV/AIDS programmes. It will be invaluable to undergraduate and postgraduate healthcare students, health and social care professionals and the international media. Policy makers and shapers will find the pioneering information crucial to the future of the AIDS strategy. 'For close to a half century, my work as a public health epidemiologist has involved field research, program management, and teaching, mostly on public health surveillance and prevention and control of communicable diseases. [Since 1981] I have been involved virtually full time with the international response to the AIDS pandemic which is without question one of the most severe infectious disease pandemics in modern times. During my public health career that began in the early 1960s, I have always been considered a part of conventional or mainstream medical science. However, since the mid-1990s, I have found myself swimming upstream against mainstream AIDS organisations. I have, during this period, gradually come to the realisation that AIDS programs developed by international agencies and faith based organizations have been and continue to be more socially, politically, and moralistically correct than epidemiologically accurate.' - James Chin, in the Preface. 'Controversy and differing opinions have been hallmarks of the AIDS epidemic since its onset. The scope of the problem, how to identify high risk groups without increasing the burden of stigma, the safety of blood products, the best balance between prevention and treatment, have all been hot issues sometimes dividing the public health community. The passion and conflicts about how to consider and address the AIDS pandemic reflect the huge impact this disease has had globally and its interplay with macro economic, legal, social, political, national security and ethical domains. Vital, provocative, thoughtful, direct, passionate, rational and willing to challenge conventional wisdom. "The AIDS Pandemic" is filled with information, rational arguments and opinions, often intermingled. It is a rare book on epidemiology that puts so much of the author's personality and viewpoints, along with his knowledge and experience, before the reader. The result is a thought-provoking, likely-to-be-controversial, contribution to the AIDS literature that should engage and stimulate the reader.' - Jeffrey Koplan, in the Foreword.

Features a collection of seven research-based articles on AIDS. This work seeks to cut through popular misunderstanding and conventional ideas about the spread and impact of AIDS by employing a political economic perspective in the analysis of the epidemic in diverse settings.

In this broad-ranging book, Michael Bloor gives an overview of our current understanding of the social conditions and contexts of HIV transmission. The author examines the social epidemiology of HIV transmission in its different manifestations in the developing world and in the West, looking at heterosexual and homosexual transmission, sex tourism and prostitution, injecting drug users, haemophiliacs and transfusion recipients. He goes on to look at reports of sociological studies of risk behaviour among men who have sex with men, among heterosexual and bisexual men and women, and among those who share syringes. Drawing on his own research, Michael Bloor presents a critical examination of the different theoretical models of risk and considers their implications for disease prevention.

In collaboration with Consulting Editor, Dr. Helen Boucher, Dr. Paul Edward Sax has put together a state-of the-art issue of the Infectious Disease Clinics of North America devoted to HIV. Clinical review articles from expert authors are specifically devoted to the following topics: HIV Diagnostics -- Current Recommendations and Opportunities for Improvement; Update on HIV Prevention -- PreP, PEP, and Other Strategies; Initial Assessment -- What Tests to Order and Why; Why Everyone (Almost) with HIV Needs to be on Treatment -- A Review of the Critical Data; Initial Therapy in the Integrase Inhibitor Era -- Can We Do Better than Two NRTIs plus an INSTI?; Switching Therapy in Patients with Virologic Suppression -- A Why and a How-To Guide; Management of Treatment Failure, With and Without Resistance; Reproduction Options for People with HIV, and Management of Pregnancy; HIV and Addiction - the Role of the ID Clinician; Management of Patients with Advanced HIV Disease - Challenges and Opportunities; HIV and Aging - Focus on Cardiovascular Risk and Metabolic Abnormalities; Key Principles in HIV Pharmacology; One Patient Has Been Cured of HIV - Will There Ever Be More?; and Linkage and Retention in Care - The Keys to Treatment Success. Readers will come away with the latest information they need to manage diagnosis, treatment and outcomes of HIV patients.

Analogous to other infections, evidence suggests that improved micronutrient intake may reduce HIV transmission and progression, as well as morbidity from common and opportunistic infections. This is important information, considering many in the world's HIV-infected population do not yet have access to anti-retroviral drugs. Micronutrients and HIV Infection presents current knowledge on the role of micronutrients in HIV and other infections - knowledge that can be used to improve case management and public health interventions.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of micronutrients and HIV infection through a review of recently published human studies and intervention trials and other important epidemiology based literature. It begins by introducing the malnutrition-infection complex, Nutritionally Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and the role of oxidative stress in infection. Then the book covers the history, biochemistry, biological functions, and food sources of individual micronutrients, and reviews their roles in host defense and resistance to infections in general, and HIV in particular. Finally, the book discusses how this information can be applied for the benefit of individuals with HIV and countries where HIV is widespread and treatment unavailable.

Most of the world's 35 million people living with HIV are micronutrient deficient and have little access to HIV testing, counseling, and care. In addition to covering specific micronutrients, Micronutrients and HIV Infection presents a critical review of how existing micronutrient interventions can be promoted, expanded, and modified to reduce the magnitude and impact of the HIV pandemic.

In the first part of this thought-provoking book, moral theologians address the worldwide AIDS pandemic and illustrate the complexity of HIV prevention and treatment within the context of local issues and cultural concerns in twenty-six cases from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America.

In the second part, essays by well-known theologians home in on the fundamental moral issues involved and demonstrate how the Roman Catholic tradition can help in constructively mediating the moral conundrum of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

A concluding essay by Kevin Kelly focuses on the challenges AIDS presents to moral theology at the beginning of the new millennium.

The "Encyclopedia of AIDS" covers all major aspects of the first 15 years of the AIDS epidemic, including the breakthroughs in treatment announced at the International AIDS Conference in July 1996. The encyclopedia provides extensive coverage of major topics in eight areas: basic science and epidemiology; transmission and prevention; pathology and treatment; impacted populations; policy and law; politics and activism; culture and society; and the global epidemic.
With more than 300 entries written by 175 specialists and illustrated with more than 100 photographs and charts, the "Encyclopedia of AIDS" is an essential reference work for students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, professionals in a wide variety of medical, service, and care fields, academics, researchers, journalists, and general readers.

AIDS is not solely a medical issue but also has profound implications for social and family relationships. Traditionally when a person is ill, the family is seen to provide emotional, practical and social support. Experience has shown, however, that AIDS disrupts this conventional pattern of support. On the one hand AIDS, like any other serious illness, affects family members both from day to day and in the long term. What distinguishes AIDS from so many other illnesses is the associated social stigma and the fact that HIV may be transmissible, or may have been transmitted, within a relationship. Most psychological and social research has concentrated on the impact of AIDS on individuals. Only recently has attention turned to the effect of AIDS on the family. This is the first book to address AIDS in the family and draws on the work of experienced researchers and practitioners from around the world. It is most fitting that the book should first be published in 1994, the United Nations International Year of the Family. Recognizing the role of the family may mark a change in emphasis in future social research and policy in relation to HIV and AIDS.

One single factor can have life-or-death importance for someone with HIV: food. The right diet and nutrition can boost the immune system, and most important, maintain lean body mass. This groundbreaking, compassionate, and medically sound sourcebook is a food bible for the HIV community and their caregivers. Cooking for Life contains all the information you need about one of the safest, most effective, yet underutilized, weapons for staying well.

Introduces AIDS, explaining what it is, how it cannot be spread by casual contact, and how to act around someone who has it.