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 memoir rife with stories about diseases and human suffering.
Using field work and new scholarship to challenge the accepted methodologies of epidemiology and international health, Farmer points out that most current explanatory strategies, from "cost-effective treatment" 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 autobiography 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 and medical students determined to treat those in need: whether in their home countries or through medical outreach programs like Doctors without Borders. Infections and Inequalities weds meticulous scholarship in medical anthropology with a passion for solutions—remedies for the plagues of the poor and the social illnesses that have sustained them.
Paul Farmer is cofounder of Partners In Health and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His most recent book is Reimagining Global Health. Other titles include To Repair the World, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor; and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, all by UC Press.
"Farmer's work diverges strikingly from the current 'emerging infectious disease' literature, much of which misses essential points about causation that Farmer brings out very well. . . . It is sure to appeal to those general readers attracted to books like Garrett's The Coming Plague, as well as to readers in medicine, public health, and the sociomedical sciences."—Frederick L. Dunn, M.D.
"Farmer argues against those who would insist that the health problems of the poor require and must await structural changes, that underdevelopment negates the efforts of physicians. He believes there is much that doctors can do, not simply as activists but as physicians."—Randall Packard, author of White Plague, Black Labor
424 pp.6 x 9
9780520229136$29.95|£25.00Paper
Feb 2001