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"Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg and Harvard AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin, PhD, recount for the first time how Western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and then fanned its rise. Drawing on remarkable new genetic discoveries, Tinderbox overturns the conventional wisdom on the origins of this deadly pandemic and the best means to fight it today"--Provided by publisher.
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Edition | Availability |
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Tinderbox: how the West sparked the AIDS epidemic and how the world can finally overcome it
2013, Penguin Books
Paperback
in English
0143123009 9780143123002
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Tinderbox: how the West sparked the AIDS epidemic and how the world can finally overcome it
2012, Penguin Press
in English
159420327X 9781594203275
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Work Description
In this groundbreaking narrative, longtime Washington Post journalist Craig Timberg and award-winning AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin tell the surprising story of how western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and then fanned its rise. Drawing on remarkable new science, Tinderbox overturns the conventional wisdom on the origins of this deadly epidemic and the best ways to fight it today. Recent genetic discoveries have traced the birth of HIV to the forbidding equatorial forests of Cameroon, where chimpanzees carried a nearly identical virus for millennia without causing a major outbreak in humans. During the Scramble for Africa near the turn of the twentieth century, colonial companies blazed new routes through the jungle in search of rubber and other riches, sending African porters into remote regions rarely traveled before. It was here, during the age of european conquest, that humans first contracted the strain of HIV that would eventually cause 99 percent of AIDS deaths around the world. Western powers were key actors in turning a localized outbreak into a sprawling epidemic as bustling new trade routes, modern colonial cities, and the rise of prostitution sped the virus across Africa. Christian missionaries campaigned to suppress polygamy, but left in its place fractured sexual cultures that proved uncommonly vulnerable to HIV. Equally devastating was the gradual loss of the African ritual of male circumcision, which recent studies have shown offers significant protection against infection. Timberg and Halperin argue that the same Western hubris that marked the colonial era has hamstrung the effort to fight HIV. From the United Nations AIDS program to the Bush administration's historic relief campaign, global health officials have favored well-meaning Western approaches -- condom promotion, abstinence campaigns, HIV testing, abstinence campaigns -- that have proven ineffective in slowing the epidemic in Africa. Meanwhile they have overlooked homegrown African initiatives aimed squarely at the behaviors spreading the virus. In a riveting narrative that stretches from colonial Leopoldville to 1980s San Francisco to South Africa today, Tinderbox reveals how human hands unleashed this epidemic and can now overcome it, if only we learn the lessons of the past. - Publisher.
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March 8, 2023 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
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