Infections and inequalities [electronic resource] : the modern plagues / Paul Farmer.

Cover; Half title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Preface to the Paperback Edition; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The Vitality of Practice: On Personal Trajectories; 2. Rethinking "Emerging Infectious Diseases"; 3. Invisible Women: Class, Gender, and HIV; 4. The Exotic and the Mundane: Human Immunodeficiency Virus in the Caribbean; 5. Culture, Poverty, and HIV Transmission: The Case of Rural Haiti; Miracles and Misery: An Ethnographic Interlude; 6. Sending Sickness: Sorcery, Politics, and Changing Concepts of AIDS in Rural Haiti.

7. The Consumption of the Poor: Tuberculosis in the Late Twentieth Century8. Optimism and Pessimism in Tuberculosis Control: Lessons from Rural Haiti; 9. Immodest Claims of Causality: Social Scientists and the "New" Tuberculosis; 10. The Persistent Plagues: Biological Expressions of Social Inequalities; Notes; References; Index.

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor. This "peculiarly modern inequality" that permeates AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious diseases such as Ebola and cholera, is laid bare in Farmer's harrowing stories of sickness and suffering. Challengi.