#264: INFECTIONS AND INEQUALITIES. New book by Paul Farmer

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

INFECTIONS AND INEQUALITIES:  THE MODERN PLAGUES.  By Paul Farmer.
	Berkeley:  The University of California Press, 1999.
	ISBN:  0-=520-21544-3.  $29.95.

The jacket cover says this about the book:

"Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of 
drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slims 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.

"What is it like to be a doctor to the poor, observing with an 
anthoropologists eye the harsh juxtapositions of excess and misery?  
Moving regularly from the teaching hospitals of Harvard, themselves 
abutting urban poverty, to a clinic in the hills of Haiti's Central 
Plateau, Farmer has experienced firsthad the 'peculiarly modern 
inequality' that seems inseparable from AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in 
the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious 
diseases such as Ebola and cholera.  In his stories of sickness and 
suffering.  Farmer challenges the accepted methodologies of epidemiology 
and international health.  He argues that most current explanations, from 
'cost-effectiveness' to patient 'non-compliance,' inevitab ly lead to 
blaming the victims.

"This moving account is fra from a hopeless inventory of insoluble 
problems.  Farmer tells us what can be done in the face of seemingly 
over-whelming odds, by physicians determining to treat those in need.  
Deeply humane and harrowing in its detail, INFECTIONS AND INEUALITIES 
weds meticulouis scholarship with a passion for solutions -- remedies for 
the plagues of the poor and the social maladies that have sustained them."

---------

Specific chapters which seem to focus on Haiti are;

Ch. 5:  "Culture, Poverty, and HIV Transmission:  The Case of Haiti."

Ch. 6:  "Sending Sickness:  Sorcery, Politics, and Changing Concepts
	of AIDS in Rural Haiti."

Ch. 8:  "Optimism and Pessimism in Tuberculosis Control:  Lessons from
	Rural Haiti."

However, the index indicates that there are referrences to Haiti in many
other places in the book than just the chapters that I cite which are
specifically on Haiti.

Bob Corbett