Living With AIDS

AIDS will be with us for the rest of our lives. Living with AIDS confronts this long-term challenge, through a series of powerful and thought-provoking essays that seek a more realistic public-health and public-policy environment for dealing with the AIDS epidemic. The essays are grouped in sections covering the sociological and historical background, cultural impacts, clinical perspectives, the public-policy agenda in the United States, and international perspectives. They also include a primer on epidemiology for readers who may not be familiar with the importance of that field in the study of AIDS.Beginning with the inescapable conclusion that there, will be no immediate cure for AIDS, although competent therapies are expected to convert AIDS into a treatable chronic malady, Living with AIDS takes up a whole array of problems created by the continuing spread of the virus. It also goes beyond dealing with AIDS as a health-care problem in essays that analyze social and political conditions, the different populations that are affected in different parts of the world, ethical and moral issues, public attitudes and individual fears, stigma, and suffering. In a tantalizing thought experiment that reinvents AIDS as a disease of young, privileged, female populations of industrialized nations, one contributor illustrates the intensely political nature, of AIDS that impedes its claim on national priorities and resources.Stephen Graubard is Editor of Dacdalas, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Brown University.