Infections and inequalities : the modern plagues / Paul Farmer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Farmer, Paul, 1959-2022.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Communicable diseases--Social aspects.

Communicable diseases.

People with social disabilities--Health and hygiene.

People with social disabilities.

Poor--Health and hygiene.

Poor.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (739 p.)

Edition:

[Updated edition with a new preface].

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Preface to the paperback edition

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The vitality of practice : on personal trajectories

2. Rethinking "emerging infectious diseases"

3. Invisible women : class, gender, and HIV

4. The exotic and the mundane : human immunodeficiency virus in the Caribbean

5. Culture, poverty, and HIV transmission : the case of rural Haiti ; Miracles and misery : an ethnographic interlude

6. Sending sickness : sorcery, politics, and changing concepts of AIDS in rural Haiti

7. The consumption of the poor : tuberculosis in the late twentieth century

8. Optimism and pessimism in tuberculosis control : lessons from rural Haiti

9. Immodest claims of causality: social scientists and the "new" tuberculosis

10. The persistent plagues : biological expressions of social inequalities.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-367) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780520927087

0520927087

OCLC:

763156547