Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues

Paul Farmer

University of California Press, £18.95, pp 375

ISBN 0520215443

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The slogan of the otherwise successful 11th World Conference on AIDS, held in 1996 in Vancouver, Canada, was “One World, One Hope.” This book reminds us that not one but two worlds exist and that, at least for the moment, there is almost no hope for one of them. Through his description of the sociocultural environment of one of the world's poorest countries, Haiti, and of two highly prevalent diseases there, tuberculosis and AIDS, Paul Farmer, an experienced medical anthropologist, shows that …