HIV and AIDS: A Very Short Introduction

Alan Whiteside has just published a short, punchy book appropriately titled HIV and AIDS: A Very Short Introduction.. It is now available online for the modest price of $10.00.

In just 132 pages of text, the book covers the AIDS waterfront, though I suspect the volume's greatest appeal will be for those, like me, who come to the issue from a non-medical, non-scientific background and whose focus is Africa. Most of the book looks at the socio-economic components of AIDS and most of the examples are from southern Africa where, after all, the pandemic is at its most devastating and the needs are greatest. If prevention is universally needed, if all AIDS patients need proper treatment, good nutrition and adequate care, southern Africa needs more of everything, urgently and desperately. Alan spells all this out in an unmistakable way, and while he mostly hides his well-known dry wit and passion under a cover of easily-understood exposition, they emerge regularly as sharp sudden stings at the end of a paragraph.

Alan grew up in Swaziland and now runs the Health, Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. HEARD staff, under his supervision, conducts research on the socio-economic aspects of public health, especially the AIDS pandemic. Alan has been immersed in fighting AIDS for twenty years and has been writing about it regularly for fifteen. Over the years he has collaborated with some of the best thinkers in the business, co-authoring books with Nana Poku, Tony Barnett, Alex de Waal and Clem Sunter. So it was both an honor and no surprise that the Oxford University Press, publishers of the Very Short Introductions series of very short books, asked Alan to pen (keyboard?) their AIDS volume.

Let me draw attention to three of the main lessons that Alan derives from his long, often frustrating years of experience in the battle against AIDS. First is that leadership is crucial. Imagine living in a country whose president is an AIDS denier, one who appoints a Minister of Health who believes in quack therapies, who encourages crackpots and opportunists peddling phony nostrums, and delays by years the rollout of ARVs with incalculable consequences for his people. That was Alan's fate as he and thousands of other AIDS activists failed to move President Mbeki off of his perverse and fatal course.

Second is the need for gender equity, something that AIDS-Free World holds dear both as a moral position and for pragmatic reasons. HIV and AIDS will never be beaten so long as women are considered subordinate and unequal. Poor Alan and our many other friends in South Africa—out of the Mbeki frying pan into the Zuma fire.

Finally, with unusual but welcome harshness, Alan attacks prevention messages that focus on abstinence and fidelity as "unrealistic, hypocritical and stigmatizing". The emphasis, as he insists, needs to be on responsible sexual behavior rather than scare tactics. For this reason if no other, we need to be hoping that the Democrats win back the presidency in next November's American election.

Alan Whiteside's little book fits easily into a jacket pocket — okay, a man's jacket pocket — or even into a smallish purse. It can be carried around as a reference, with its many facts and figures and tables and its coverage of most of the key issues we all want to know something about. It won't make you an expert. But you'll know what you're talking about and you'll have a better idea of all the work we still have to do to wrestle this monster to the ground. You can hardly expect more from 132 pages.

HIV and AIDS: A Very Short Introduction is now available online for the modest price of $10.00.