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In this book, France's leading medical anthropologist takes on one of the most tragic stories of the global AIDS crisis—the failure of the ANC government to stem the tide of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. Didier Fassin traces the deep roots of the AIDS crisis to apartheid and, before that, to the colonial period.

\"Human health is shaped by the interactions between social and ecological systems. States of Disease advances a social ecology of health framework to demonstrate how historical spatial formations contribute to contemporary vulnerabilities to disease and the possibilities for health justice. The book examines how managed HIV in South Africa is being transformed with expanded access to antiretroviral therapy, and how environmental health in northern Botswana is shifting due to global climate change and flooding variability. These cases demonstrate how the political environmental context shapes the ways in which health is embodied, experienced, and managed\"--Provided by publisher.

In some parts of South Africa, more than one in three people are HIV positive. Love in the Time of AIDS explores transformations in notions of gender and intimacy to try to understand the roots of this virulent epidemic. By living in an informal settlement and collecting love letters, cell phone text messages, oral histories, and archival materials, Mark Hunter details the everyday social inequalities that have resulted in untimely deaths. Hunter shows how first apartheid and then chronic unemployment have become entangled with ideas about femininity, masculinity, love, and sex and have created an economy of exchange that perpetuates the transmission of HIV/AIDS. This sobering ethnography challenges conventional understandings of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

Between 2002 and 2013 bilateral donors spent over $64 billion on AIDS intervention in low- and middle-income countries. During the same period, nearly 25 million people died of AIDS and more than 32 million were newly infected with HIV. In this book for students of political economy and public policy in Africa, as well as of global health, Kim Yi Dionne tries to understand why AIDS interventions in Africa often fail. The fight against AIDS requires the coordination of multiple actors across borders and levels of governance in highly affected countries, and these actors can be the primary sources of the problem. -- From inside cover.

This groundbreaking work, with its unique anthropological approach, sheds new light on a central conundrum surrounding AIDS in Africa. Robert J. Thornton explores why HIV prevalence fell during the 1990s in Uganda despite that country's having one of Africa's highest fertility rates, while during the same period HIV prevalence rose in South Africa, the country with Africa's lowest fertility rate. Thornton finds that culturally and socially determined differences in the structure of sexual networks—rather than changes in individual behavior—were responsible for these radical differences in HIV prevalence. Incorporating such factors as property, mobility, social status, and political authority into our understanding of AIDS transmission, Thornton's analysis also suggests new avenues for fighting the disease worldwide.

In 2003-2006, Patricia Henderson lived in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal where she recorded the experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS. In this illuminating study, she recounts the concerns of rural people and explores local repertoires through which illness was folded into everyday life. The book spans a period when antiretroviral medication was not available, and moves on to a time when the treatment became accessible. Hope gradually became manifest in the recovery of a number of people through antiretroviral therapies and 'the return' of bodies they could recognise as their own. This research implies that protracted interaction with people over time, offers insights into the unfolding textures of everyday life, in particular in its focus on suffering, social and structural inequality, illness, violence, mourning, sensibility, care and intimacy. This title is available in the OAPEN Library - http://www.oapen.org.

This book explores the impacts of HIV/AIDS and neoliberal globalization on the occupational health of public sector hospital nurses in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The story of South African public sector nurses provides multiple perspectives on the HIV/AIDS epidemic-for a workforce that played a role in the struggle against apartheid, women who deal with the burden of HIV/AIDS care at work and in the community, and a constituency of the new South African democracy that is working on the frontlines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Through case studies of three provincial hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal, set against a historical backdrop, this book tells the story of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the post-apartheid period. Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Understanding a Public Health Crisis from a Work Environment Perspective Introduces how the research came about through the author's interest in HIV/AIDS and the impacts of neoliberal globalization on health care workers. Chapter 1. Globalization and Health in sub-Saharan Africa Describes how the post-colonial experience in the 1970s, economic crisis, and subsequent structural adjustment policies had devastating impacts on health and health care systems. Chapter 2. Neoliberalism in Postapartheid South Africa and the HIV/AIDS Epidemic Describes how the African National Congress government adopted neoliberal macroeconomic policy and failed to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early years of South African independence. Chapter 3. The Work Environment of Nurses Explores the historical and current work environment of nurses in the context of 'brain drain', labor migration, and the global nursing shortage. Chapter 4. Case Study Setting: Three Public Hospitals In KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Introduces the 3 KZN provincial hospitals that are the subject of this study; uses interviews with managers and administrators to explore the challenges faced in 3 disparate settings. Chapter 5. Staffing, Occupational Health, and HIV/AIDS Uses interviews with managers and administrators to explore staffing, occupational health procedures and programs, and the impacts of HIV/AIDS in 3 provincial KZN hospitals. Chapter 6. Nurses Speak Through interviews, nurses explain their views on workplace health and safety, HIV/AIDS, and government health policies. Chapter 7. Discussion—Breathing Life into Policy: Toward a Labor/Work Environment Perspective on a Global Public Health Crisis This concluding discussion argues that it will not be possible to meet the needs of poor people living with HIV/AIDS unless attention is paid to the work environment of frontline caregivers. Appendix: Group Interview Results Summary References Index

Changing the Course of AIDS is an in-depth evaluation of a new and exciting way to create the kind of much-needed behavioral change that could affect the course of the global health crisis of HIV/AIDS. This case study from the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic demonstrates that regular workers serving as peer educators can be as—or even more—effective agents of behavioral change than experts who lecture about the facts and so-called appropriate health care behavior. After spending six years researching the response of large South African companies to the epidemic that is decimating their workforce as well as South African communities, David Dickinson describes the promise of this grassroots intervention—workers educating one another in the workplace and community—and the limitations of traditional top-down strategies.Dickinson's book takes us right into the South African workplace to show how effective and yet enormously complex peer education really is. We see what it means when workers directly tackle the kinds of sexual, gender, religious, ethnic, and broader social and political taboos that make behavior change so difficult, particularly when that behavior involves sex and sexuality. Dickinson's findings show that people who are not officially health care experts or even health care workers can be skilled and effective educators. In this book we see why peer education has so much to offer societies grappling with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and why those interested in changing behaviors to ameliorate other health problems like obesity, alcoholism, and substance abuse have so much to learn from the South African example.

Changing the Course of AIDS is an in-depth evaluation of a new and exciting way to create the kind of much-needed behavioral change that could affect the course of the global health crisis of HIV/AIDS. This case study from the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic demonstrates that regular workers serving as peer educators can be as—or even more—effective agents of behavioral change than experts who lecture about the facts and so-called appropriate health care behavior. After spending six years researching the response of large South African companies to the epidemic that is decimating their workforce as well as South African communities, David Dickinson describes the promise of this grassroots intervention—workers educating one another in the workplace and community—and the limitations of traditional top-down strategies. Dickinson's book takes us right into the South African workplace to show how effective and yet enormously complex peer education really is. We see what it means when workers directly tackle the kinds of sexual, gender, religious, ethnic, and broader social and political taboos that make behavior change so difficult, particularly when that behavior involves sex and sexuality. Dickinson's findings show that people who are not officially health care experts or even health care workers can be skilled and effective educators. In this book we see why peer education has so much to offer societies grappling with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and why those interested in changing behaviors to ameliorate other health problems like obesity, alcoholism, and substance abuse have so much to learn from the South African example.