Tinderbox; How the West Sparked the Aids Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It
Jeffrey L. Ward (Maps) New York: The Penguin Press, 2012. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [10], 421, [1] pages. Maps. Illustrations. Pencil underlining and marks noted. Includes Authors' Note, Prologue, Appendix: How the AIDS Epidemic Can Be Overcome, Acknowledgments, Notes, References to the Appendix; Additional Suggested Readings; and Index. Drawing on remarkable new science, this book tells the story of how Western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and then fanned its rise. Drawing on remarkable new science, Tinderbox overturns the conventional wisdom on the origins of the deadly AIDS epidemic, and the best ways to fight it today. Recent genetic discoveries have traced the birth of HIV to the forbidding equatorial forests of Cameroon, where chimpanzees carried a nearly identical virus for illennia without causing a major outbreak in humans. During the Scramble for Africa near the turn of the twentieth century, colonial companies blazed new routes through the jungle in search of rubber and other riches, sending African porters into remote regions rarely traveled before. It was here, during the age of European conquest, that humans first contracted the strain of HIV that would eventually cause 99 percent of AIDS deaths around the world. This book is an indictment of Western ineptitude and meddling and lost opportunities to prevent millions of infections and deaths. But it also contains valuable prescriptions for making change--and it's an important read for anyone who cares about Africa. Craig Timberg is a national technology reporter for The Washington Post, specializing in privacy, security and surveillance. Since joining The Post in 1998, he has been a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent and has co-authored a book, “Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It.” He contributed to The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the National Security Agency. Before joining UNC-SPH in 2011 as an Adjunct Professor (equivalent Full Professor level), Dr. Halperin served on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health since 2006. Prior to that he was employed for over five years as the Senior HIV Prevention and Behavior Change Advisor at the US Agency for International Development. Dr. Halperin has conducted epidemiological and ethnographic research for forty years on a number of health and sociocultural issues in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions. Since completing his doctoral training in medical and cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1995, his work mainly focused on the heterosexual transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: This absorbing interdisciplinary study of HIV/AIDS explores how the West inadvertently unleashed the AIDS epidemic and then failed to combat it effectively, especially in the most vulnerable regions in Africa. Drawing on the latest genetic research, Washington Post reporter Timberg and Harvard epidemiologist and medical anthropologist Halperin trace the disease’s origins in the Cameroonian jungle, where HIV’s transmission from chimps to humans coincided with the rapacious period of colonial expansion as the quest for rubber sap and ivory created new transportation networks, along which the disease traveled, and a large, hectic colonial city (Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Africa’s susceptibility, the authors suggest, was partly due to changing social customs. For example, Christian missionaries discouraged rituals such as male circumcision, now known to significantly reduce the spread of HIV. As the Western powers poured money into combating the spread of AIDS, they favored biomedical approaches and ignored potentially lifesaving African initiatives, such as modifying sexual behavior and male circumcision. Highlighting the politics of AIDS, where there were powerful incentives to work within the conventional wisdom to win lucrative government contracts, this timely exposé advocates practical solutions to a seemingly intractable problem. Condition: Good / Good.
Keywords: AIDS, Epidemic, Condom, Circumcision, Botswana, Antiretrovirals, Behavior Change, Homosexuality, Kenya, Peter Piot, Prevention, Sexually Transmitted Disease, Uganda, South Africa, World Health Organization, Jeffrey Ward
ISBN: 9781594203275
[Book #82541]
Price: $45.00