Infections and Inequalities
Paul Farmer is a cofounder of Partners In Health and the Chair of Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. Reimagining Global Health is his most recent book. To Repair the World, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame are all available from UC Press.
Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and drug-resistant TB in Peruvian slums. Farmer, a physician-anthropologist with over fifteen years of experience in the field, writes from the front lines of the struggle against these new diseases, demonstrating why, even more than those of history, they target the poor. This "unusually modern inequity" that pervades AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds new (or re-emerging) infectious illnesses like Ebola and cholera, is laid bare in Farmer's devastating memoir filled with disease and human suffering stories.
In Infections and Inequalities, one of the best books on diseases, Farmer argues that most existing explanatory tactics, from "cost-effective therapy" to patient "noncompliance," eventually lead to blaming the victims, using field work and fresh scholarship to challenge accepted methodologies of epidemiology and international health. In actuality, greater forces, both global and local, influence why some people are sick and others are not. Nonetheless, this stirring autobiography is far from a list of unsolvable issues. Farmer writes on what physicians and medical students may achieve in the face of seemingly enormous odds, whether in their native countries or through medical outreach programs like Doctors Without Borders. Infections and Inequalities combines thorough medical anthropological studies with a desire for solutions—remedies for the poor's plagues and the social maladies that have supported them.
Author: Paul Farmer
Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Infections-Inequalities-Plagues-Updated-Preface/dp/0520229134/
Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars (from 109 reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #99,064 in Books
#8 in Epidemiology (Books)
#14 in Diseases
#15 in Infectious Diseases (Books)
