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

Epstein, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312427727 ISBN 13: 9780312427726

Publisher: Picador, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Product Description:

Discusses the struggle of international health experts, governments and ordinary Africans to understand the devastating spread of HIV in Africa, and traces how their responses to the crisis have changed in light of new medical developments and political realities.

Review:

"An enlightening and troubling book." --The New York Times

"Helen Epstein is one of a rare species: the scientist turned storyteller. . . . [A] blunt, informed critique." --Salon.com

"The UN and President Bush should not just read Epstein's book, they should distribute it around Africa." --The Sunday Times (London)

"Elegant prose, a scientific background, and a journalist's searching anecdotal eye." --Nature

"Sometimes a bolt of clarity shoots out of the blue . . . as it will for readers of this book who yearn for insights on how a deadly virus now infects an estimated 25 million Africans and has killed untold millions more." --The New York Times Book Review

"Epstein has a compelling thesis, and she explains it in lucid, sometimes extraordinary prose." --The Nation

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0312427727
• ISBN 13: 9780312427726
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352