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Infections and Inequalities
Paul Farmer
The Modern Plagues, Updated with a New Preface
University of California Press
March 2001
On Sale: February 23, 2001
419 pages ISBN: 0520229134 EAN: 9780520229136 Kindle: B005W2QH44 Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
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 stories of
sickness and suffering. Challenging the accepted methodologies of epidemiology and
international health, he points out that most current
explanatory strategies, from "cost-effectiveness" 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 account 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
determined to treat those in need. Infections and Inequalities weds meticulous scholarship with
a passion for solutions—remedies for the plagues of the poor
and the social maladies that have sustained them.
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