Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination

Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination PDF Author: G. Bright
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113701122X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
This book explores how the cultural process of making any disease a "plague" results in discrimination against certain groups, as it has for those with AIDS in America. Gina M. Bright here captures the discrimination produced by plague-making in her analysis and her portraits of the people she has cared for with AIDS over the past quarter-century.

Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination

Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination PDF Author: G. Bright
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113701122X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores how the cultural process of making any disease a "plague" results in discrimination against certain groups, as it has for those with AIDS in America. Gina M. Bright here captures the discrimination produced by plague-making in her analysis and her portraits of the people she has cared for with AIDS over the past quarter-century.

Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination

Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination PDF Author: G. Bright
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113701122X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This book explores how the cultural process of making any disease a "plague" results in discrimination against certain groups, as it has for those with AIDS in America. Gina M. Bright here captures the discrimination produced by plague-making in her analysis and her portraits of the people she has cared for with AIDS over the past quarter-century.

Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic

Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic PDF Author: Richard A. McKay
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606400X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Now an award-winning documentary feature film The search for a “patient zero”—popularly understood to be the first person infected in an epidemic—has been key to media coverage of major infectious disease outbreaks for more than three decades. Yet the term itself did not exist before the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. How did this idea so swiftly come to exert such a strong grip on the scientific, media, and popular consciousness? In Patient Zero, Richard A. McKay interprets a wealth of archival sources and interviews to demonstrate how this seemingly new concept drew upon centuries-old ideas—and fears—about contagion and social disorder. McKay presents a carefully documented and sensitively written account of the life of Gaétan Dugas, a gay man whose skin cancer diagnosis in 1980 took on very different meanings as the HIV/AIDS epidemic developed—and who received widespread posthumous infamy when he was incorrectly identified as patient zero of the North American outbreak. McKay shows how investigators from the US Centers for Disease Control inadvertently created the term amid their early research into the emerging health crisis; how an ambitious journalist dramatically amplified the idea in his determination to reframe national debates about AIDS; and how many individuals grappled with the notion of patient zero—adopting, challenging and redirecting its powerful meanings—as they tried to make sense of and respond to the first fifteen years of an unfolding epidemic. With important insights for our interconnected age, Patient Zero untangles the complex process by which individuals and groups create meaning and allocate blame when faced with new disease threats. What McKay gives us here is myth-smashing revisionist history at its best.

To End a Plague

To End a Plague PDF Author: Emily Bass
Publisher: Public Affairs
ISBN: 9781541762435
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The story of America's unlikeliest, least-known, yet greatest achievement this millennium: containing AIDS in Africa. As of 2003, there were nearly 27 million men, women, and children suffering from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Today that number has been reduced by more than half. The number of people with access to antiretroviral drugs--a treatment which renders AIDS survivable rather than fatal--has gone from around 50,000 to more than 11 million. All of this is thanks to a Bush administration program known as PEPFAR. Even on the day of its launch during the 2003 State of the Union, no one much noticed it. It cost a fraction of a percentage of the overall budget and was far less expensive than the Iraq war, effectively announced on the same day. Yet PEPFAR is, according to journalist Emily Bass, "the best thing America has done beyond our borders in this century." To End a Plague is not merely a history of this extraordinary program; it describes the cost of success in our broken political system. PEPFAR was likely a cynical political ploy--a "legislative trophy" as the New York Times described it--and its overseers, including the now-famous Coronavirus Task Force leader Deborah Birx--had to make moral and political compromises to keep it from being shut down. Yet the program has persevered and made an enormous improvement in millions of lives. This is the story of true change and what it takes to make it.

Fear

Fear PDF Author: Robert Peckham
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1782838139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
'Extraordinary' Ai Weiwei 'Brilliant' Simon Schama Fear has long been a driving force - perhaps the driving force - of world history: a coercive tool of power and a catalyst for radical change. Here, Robert Peckham traces its transformative role over a millennium, from fears of famine and war to anxieties over God, disease, technology and financial crises. In a landmark global history that ranges from the Black Death to the terror of the French Revolution, the AIDS pandemic to climate change, Peckham reveals how fear made us who we are, and how understanding it can equip us to face the future.

The Sounds of Furious Living

The Sounds of Furious Living PDF Author: Matthew Kelly
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978835094
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Four decades have passed since reports of a mysterious “gay cancer” first appeared in US newspapers. In the ensuing years, the pandemic that would come to be called AIDS changed the world in innumerable ways. It also gave rise to one of the late twentieth century’s largest health-based empowerment movements. Scholars across diverse traditions have documented the rise of the AIDS activist movement, chronicling the impassioned echoes of protestors who took to the streets to demand “drugs into bodies.” And yet not all activism creates echoes. Included among the ranks of 1980s and 1990s-era AIDS activists were individuals whose expressions of empowerment differed markedly from those demanding open access to mainstream pharmaceutical agents. Largely forgotten today, this activist tradition was comprised of individuals who embraced unorthodox approaches for conceptualizing and treating their condition. Rejecting biomedical expertise, they shared alternative clinical paradigms, created underground networks for distributing unorthodox nostrums, and endorsed etiological models that challenged the association between HIV and AIDS. The theatre of their protests was not the streets of New York City’s Greenwich Village but rather their bodies. And their language was not the riotous chants of public demonstration but the often-invisible embrace of contrarian systems for defining and treating their disease. The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the twentieth century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the twenty-first century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.

AIDS

AIDS PDF Author: Elizabeth Fee
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520077782
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Finally, several contributors provide a sampling of international perspectives on the impact of AIDS in other nations. When AIDS was first recognized in 1981, most experts believed that it was a plague, a virulent unexpected disease. They thought AIDS, as a plague, would resemble the great epidemics of the past; it would be devastating but would soon subside, perhaps never to return. The media as well as many policy makers accepted this historical analogy. Much of the response to AIDS in the United States and abroad during the first five years of the epidemic assumed that it could be addressed by severe emergency measures that would reassure a frightened population while signaling social concern for the sufferers and those at risk of contracting the disease. By the middle 1980s, however, it became increasingly clear that AIDS was a chronic infection, not a classic plague.

Epidemic Cinema

Epidemic Cinema PDF Author: Julia Echeverría
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003823769
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book examines the recent trend in global cinema to feature infectious disease. As the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic materialised the anxieties and discourses of world risk that had long been portrayed in popular media, the book provides a novel definition of the epidemic film genre and offers a systematic look into the narrative and stylistic conventions that characterise it. Epidemic Cinema traces the evolution of the genre from its early cinematic origins to establish the founding principles of a genre standing at the crossroads between science-fiction and horror. It draws on close textual analysis to show how the pandemic reified one of the central predicaments of epidemic narratives: the constant tension existing between free-floating phenomena and the impulse to control and resist such phenomena, ultimately epitomised by the trope of the border. Showing how infectious diseases offer a rich allegorical frame which cinema uses to articulate timely anxieties of growingly invisible and deterritorialised risks, the author presents the prevalence of contagion in popular culture as a symptom of this growingly viral and virus-ridden context, both in its most literal and metaphorical sense. This insightful study will interest students and scholars of film studies, global cinema, science-fiction, horror, popular culture and genre theory.

The Charon Club

The Charon Club PDF Author: Gina Bright
Publisher: Running Wild, LLC
ISBN: 1955062722
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The AIDS Quilt will be on display in June 2021 for the 40th anniversary of the first cases, but it will be its last appearance as ordered by the heavy hand of the President of the United States. Nine nurses who worked with AIDS patients during the early years of the pandemic travel to Washington, D.C. to see the Quilt. While there, they are called upon by the National Health Center to care for patients with a new, unknown infectious disease and racist views, and they are asked to find the clues to its cause so that a VIP patient can be cured. But the nurses discover that even more challenging than this difficult assignment are the memories they begin to share from their painful AIDS nursing past. The Charon Club, a fictional chronicle of AIDS nurses' memories and experiences, set in the midst of an emerging infectious disease in the eastern United States in 2021, was written by a nurse who worked on an AIDS unit in New York City during the darkest years of the pandemic. It is the first AIDS novel solely devoted to the work of nurses.

The Plague Year

The Plague Year PDF Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0593320727
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.