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Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 301
EAN: 9780520229136
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0520229134
Label: University of California Press
Manufacturer: University of California Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 419
Publication Date: February 23, 2001
Publisher: University of California Press
Studio: University of California Press
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Editorial Review:
Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor. This "peculiarly modern inequality" that permeates AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious diseases such as Ebola and cholera, is laid bare in Farmer's harrowing stories of sickness and suffering.
Challenging the accepted methodologies of epidemiology and international health, he points out that most current explanatory strategies, from "cost-effectiveness" to patient "noncompliance," inevitably lead to blaming the victims. In reality, larger forces, global as well as local, determine why some people are sick and others are shielded from risk. Yet this moving account is far from a hopeless inventory of insoluble problems. Farmer writes of what can be done in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, by physicians determined to treat those in need. Infections and Inequalities weds meticulous scholarship with a passion for solutions--remedies for the plagues of the poor and the social maladies that have sustained them.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Where are the Virchows of global public health?
The context of epidemics is important. What happens to the poor people who have drug resistant tuberculosis? Market mechanisms do not serve the interest of global health equity. The cost-efectiveness argument is weak. Poverty limits freedom of choice. AIDS education falls short. Arguments about limited resources should not prevail. There is a global web of unequal relationships. Structural violence and cultural difference have been conflated in AIDS studies.
Anthropology and ... Read More
Rating: - Buy it. Read it.
An enlightening and insightful book that passionately sets a higher standard for those involved in medicine or any type of humanitarian work. He is passionate about what he says, but careful not to make assumptions that have not been well documented and researched. The book challenged my thinking when it comes to health care, poverty, and our social duty to take action against injustices in the world.
Rating:  - Infections & Inequalities by Paul Farmer
Too long . Written with sientific dicipline & detail and burdened by too much specialized medical terminology for the popular reader . The idealism is admerable and the conclusion are justified but it speaks to the medical profession more than to the general public . A slow diffucult book to read . Sombody else should write the same book for the popular reader and for leaders in public policy .
Rating: - careless errors, mediocre conclusion
By claiming "social reform," Farmer contradicts his stance as an American citizen: Haiti has no money to support its own citizens, that's why the US and others are doing Haiti's job. But, the US has to care for its own citizens as well therefore has to first work on its own AIDS patients within its boundary. If the US does that as its social reform, Haiti instantly dries up.
Irritating mistakes somehow got through inspection: PAligre Dam? PEligre? (P. 174) PuertO Plata? PueltA? (P. 119)
Rating: - Medical-anthropological approach to HIV & TB illuminates roles of inequality and poverty in spread of disease
Farmer, a physician-anthropologist and activist, examines both the way that poverty and inequality result in the spread of HIV and TB today and the flawed justifications for inequitable access to treatment. His ethnographic analysis provides a powerful complement to standard epidemiological work, and this treatise on the danger as well as the immorality of inequity in medical care is largely convincing.
Farmer illustrates several broad themes effectively with case studies from Haiti and ... Read More
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