Infectious Ideas

Infectious Ideas
Author: Jennifer Brier
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2009-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807895474

Viewing contemporary history from the perspective of the AIDS crisis, Jennifer Brier provides rich, new understandings of the United States' complex social and political trends in the post-1960s era. Brier describes how AIDS workers--in groups as disparate as the gay and lesbian press, AIDS service organizations, private philanthropies, and the State Department--influenced American politics, especially on issues such as gay and lesbian rights, reproductive health, racial justice, and health care policy, even in the face of the expansion of the New Right. Infectious Ideas places recent social, cultural, and political events in a new light, making an important contribution to our understanding of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.

South African AIDS Activism and Global Health Politics

South African AIDS Activism and Global Health Politics
Author: Mandisa Mbali
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-03-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780230360624

What did South African AIDS activists contribute, politically, to early international advocacy for free HIV medicines for the world's poor? Mandisa Mbali demonstrates that South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) gave moral legitimacy to the international movement which enabled it to effectively push for new models of global health diplomacy and governance. The TAC rapidly acquired moral credibility, she argues, because of its leaders' anti-apartheid political backgrounds, its successful human rights-based litigation and its effective popularization of AIDS-related science. The country's arresting democratic transition in 1994 enabled South African activists to form transnational alliances. Its new Constitution provided novel opportunities for legal activism, such as the TAC's advocacy against multinational pharmaceutical companies and the South African government. Mbali's history of the TAC sheds light on its evolution into an influential force for global health justice.

AIDS: Activism and Alliances

AIDS: Activism and Alliances
Author: Peter Aggleton
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1135740682

From the start of the AIDS epidemic there have been calls for greater solidarity between affected groups and communities, and public health services. This can be seen both in the move towards healthy alliances in health service work, and in the demands of AIDS activists worldwide. This text brings together specially selected papers addressing these and related themes given at the Eighth Conference on Social Aspects of AIDS held in London in late 1995. Among the issues examined are profession and policy; the heightened vulnerability of groups such as women and younger gay men; and issues of drug use, disability and HIV prevention.

Drugs Into Bodies

Drugs Into Bodies
Author: Raymond A. Smith
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006-03-30
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0275983250

Drugs into Bodies recounts the emergence and development of a globally oriented AIDS treatment activist movement that refused to accept that more than 40 million people with HIV in the developing world should simply be left to die. Rooted in earlier AIDS activist efforts, this new movement has forged a global network dedicated to providing universal access to life-saving medications. More than 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, yet only a small fraction have access to life-saving treatments. For many years, governments, pharmaceutical companies, and even some international relief agencies have called this a tragic but unavoidable situation, given the high cost of the medications used to fight HIV. A small but growing group of activists, however, have banded together to prove that the obstacles to universal HIV treatments are mostly human-made, and thus can be overcome by human actions. Drugs into Bodies chronicles the birth and expansion of the global AIDS treatment activist movement, focusing in particular on the U.S.-based organization Health GAP. Drawing on the legacy of the protest group ACT UP and other earlier AIDS activism, Health GAP and like-minded allies have forged a global network to combat the AIDS crisis in Africa and throughout the developing world. From the White House to the United Nations, from plush corporate offices to South African shantytowns, AIDS treatment activists have defied the dictates of globalization, altered government policies, shamed multinational corporations, secured funding for treatment, and brought hope to millions of people with HIV.

Celluloid Activist

Celluloid Activist
Author: Michael Schiavi
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2011-05-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0299282333

Celluloid Activist is the biography of gay-rights giant Vito Russo, the man who wrote The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, commonly regarded as the foundational text of gay and lesbian film studies and one of the first to be widely read. But Russo was much more than a pioneering journalist and author. A founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and cofounder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Russo lived at the center of the most important gay cultural turning points in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. His life as a cultural Zelig intersects a crucial period of social change, and in some ways his story becomes the story of a developing gay revolution in America. A frequent participant at “zaps” and an organizer of Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) cabarets and dances—which gave the New York gay and lesbian community its first social alternative to Mafia-owned bars—Russo made his most enduring contribution to the GAA with his marshaling of “Movie Nights,” the forerunners to his worldwide Celluloid Closet lecture tours that gave gay audiences their first community forum for the dissection of gay imagery in mainstream film. Biographer Michael Schiavi unravels Vito Russo’s fascinating life story, from his childhood in East Harlem to his own heartbreaking experiences with HIV/AIDS. Drawing on archival materials, unpublished letters and journals, and more than two hundred interviews, including conversations with a range of Russo’s friends and family from brother Charlie Russo to comedian Lily Tomlin to pioneering activist and playwright Larry Kramer, Celluloid Activistprovides an unprecedented portrait of a man who defined gay-rights and AIDS activism. “Schiavi tells a compelling story in this biography—from his re-creation of life on the streets of East Harlem and in Greenwich Village of the 1960s and 1970s to the way he conveys Russo’s excitement about his film research and popular education to his account of the AIDS years in New York City.”—John D’Emilio, Italian American Review “In [Schiavi’s] hands Russo’s life is both fascinating in its own right and a window into a larger milieu of activism during two critical decades.”—Italian American Review Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers Finalist, Gay Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Awards Finalist, Over the Rainbow Selection, American Library Association

To End a Plague

To End a Plague
Author: Emily Bass
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1541762452

“Randy Shilts and Laurie Garrett told the story of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the late 1980s and the early 1990s, respectively. Now journalist-historian-activist Emily Bass tells the story of US engagement in HIV/AIDS control in sub-Saharan Africa. There is far to go on the path, but Bass tells us how far we’ve come.” —Sten H. Vermund, professor and dean, Yale School of Public Health With his 2003 announcement of a program known as PEPFAR, George W. Bush launched an astonishingly successful American war against a global pandemic. PEPFAR played a key role in slashing HIV cases and AIDS deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the brink of epidemic control. Resilient in the face of flatlined funding and political headwinds, PEPFAR is America’s singular example of how to fight long-term plague—and win. To End a Plague is not merely the definitive history of this extraordinary program; it traces the lives of the activists who first impelled President Bush to take action, and later sought to prevent AIDS deaths at the whims of American politics. Moving from raucous street protests to the marbled halls of Washington and the clinics and homes where Ugandan people living with HIV fight to survive, it reveals an America that was once capable of real and meaningful change—and illuminates imperatives for future pandemic wars. Exhaustively researched and vividly written, this is the true story of an American moonshot.

Women, AIDS, and Activism

Women, AIDS, and Activism
Author: Marion Banzhaf
Publisher:
Total Pages: 295
Release: 1990-01
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9780896083936

A comprehensive and progressive book about women in the AIDS epidemic. With informative discussion of safer sex and sexuality, HIV testing, treatment and drug trials, public policy and activism. Looking specifically to lesbians, heterosexuals, bisexuals, prostitutes, intravenous drug users, teenagers, mothers, pregnant women, and women in prisons, this book is essential reading for everyone concerned about women's health and the AIDS crisis.

Up Against the Wall

Up Against the Wall
Author: Donald Albrecht
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre: AIDS (Disease)
ISBN: 9781939125781

Up Against the Wall: Art, Activism, and the AIDS Poster offers nearly 200 examples of visually arresting and socially meaningful posters, taken from more than 8,000 held in the collection in the University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries' Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation. The collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world, was donated to the University of Rochester by Dr. Edward Atwater. The book accompanies an exhibition of AIDS education posters displayed at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY.The posters, spanning the years from 1982 to the present, show how social, religious, civic, and public health agencies have addressed the controversial, often contested terrain of the HIV/AIDS pandemic within the public realm. Organizations and creators tailored their messages to audiences, both broad and very specific, and used a wide array of strategies, employing humor, emotion, scare tactics, simple scientific explanations, sexual imagery, and many other methods to communicate powerfully and effectively.

The Social Impact of AIDS in the United States

The Social Impact of AIDS in the United States
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 1993-02-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309046289

Europe's "Black Death" contributed to the rise of nation states, mercantile economies, and even the Reformation. Will the AIDS epidemic have similar dramatic effects on the social and political landscape of the twenty-first century? This readable volume looks at the impact of AIDS since its emergence and suggests its effects in the next decade, when a million or more Americans will likely die of the disease. The Social Impact of AIDS in the United States addresses some of the most sensitive and controversial issues in the public debate over AIDS. This landmark book explores how AIDS has affected fundamental policies and practices in our major institutions, examining: How America's major religious organizations have dealt with sometimes conflicting values: the imperative of care for the sick versus traditional views of homosexuality and drug use. Hotly debated public health measures, such as HIV antibody testing and screening, tracing of sexual contacts, and quarantine. The potential risk of HIV infection to and from health care workers. How AIDS activists have brought about major change in the way new drugs are brought to the marketplace. The impact of AIDS on community-based organizations, from volunteers caring for individuals to the highly political ACT-UP organization. Coping with HIV infection in prisons. Two case studies shed light on HIV and the family relationship. One reports on some efforts to gain legal recognition for nonmarital relationships, and the other examines foster care programs for newborns with the HIV virus. A case study of New York City details how selected institutions interact to give what may be a picture of AIDS in the future. This clear and comprehensive presentation will be of interest to anyone concerned about AIDS and its impact on the country: health professionals, sociologists, psychologists, advocates for at-risk populations, and interested individuals.

Living with HIV in Post-Crisis Times

Living with HIV in Post-Crisis Times
Author: David A.B. Murray
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2021-08-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1666901490

Over the past decade, effective prevention and treatment policies have resulted in global health organizations claiming that the end of the HIV/AIDS crisis is near and that HIV/AIDS is now a chronic but manageable disease. These proclamations have been accompanied by stagnant or decreasing public interest in and financial support for people living with HIV and the organizations that support them, minimizing significant global disparities in the management and control of the HIV pandemic. The contributors to this edited collection explore how diverse communities of people living with HIV (PLHIV) and organizations that support them are navigating physical, social, political, and economic challenges during these so-called “post-crisis” times.