This book offers a unique personal perspective on the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. It is a first person narrative of a European homosexual who tested positive in the early eighties. The author owes his survival to tell the tale not least to the drugs, which in his home country are accessible to any person who is HIV positive. Frank Ham visited Malawi in 1999 and repeatedly thereafter to try and understand precisely why AIDS has been so much more prevalent in Africa than in the West. He pins much of his analysis on the scarcity and affordability of the drugs, without which the lives of millions are being destroyed or threatened. He also considers environmental factors, the role of the Christian churches, and how AIDS is affecting the continent's youth. The narrative challenges and breaks the silence on many dimensions of the disease which are still widely taboo. Indeed finding a publisher in Africa for a frankly written account of AIDS, from the point of view of a homosexual was no mean feat.
This book offers detailed ethnographic studies from Africa and the Caribbean to explain AIDS in a global and comparative third-world context. The essays move beyond medical or epidemiological models, explaining the epidemic in its economic, social, political, and historic contexts....
Across Africa, HIV/AIDS is slowly killing millions of people in the prime of their lives, weakening state structures, deepening poverty and reversing the gains in life expectancy achieved over the past century. Although many who study the dynamics of Africas...
The Bushbuckridge region of South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. Having first arrived in the area in the early 1990s, the disease spread rapidly, and by 2008 life expectancies had fallen by...
AIDS orphans and vulnerable children in Africa : identifying the best practices for care, treatment, and prevention : hearing before the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Seventh Congress, second session, April 17, 2002.