Why AIDS Research Is Wrong

Book review by Gordon Youngman - only on LifeLube

The Invisible Cure: Africa, The West, and the Fight Against AIDS

By Helen Epstein

Helen Epstein claims to have found the cure for AIDS, but it is no magic bullet. This American scientist turned health writer first began searching for a vaccine to prevent HIV back in the early 1990s in Uganda, which ended disappointingly. She has spent the time since then travelling around the continent, exploring the history of the virus, how it is spread and what Africans themselves are doing to cope, the results of which appear in her new book The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight Against AIDS.

Despite her science background, Ms. Epstein is a good writer who manages to convey often jargon-filled polysyllabic terms and techniques into digestible reading (perhaps in part due to being the daughter of the late founder of the New York Review of Books Barbara Epstein). She tells her story in the first person and paints quick yet vivid portraits of the people she works with and encounters during her projects. This isn't a book about the struggle to make and get drugs to AIDS victims, but rather how health officials have misunderstood the nature of the virus in east and southern Africa, which led to ineffective prevention programs that inadvertently wasted donor funds over the past 15 years.

AIDS is a social problem, Ms. Epstein says, that is perpetuated by historically-rooted sexual behaviour (having few but concurrent sexual partners instead of serial monogamous relationships), the effects of post-colonialism and globalization, which are all linked to the battle between the sexes. Economies broken by globalization and a wide prosperity gap led to economic insecurity which fuels a web of relationships between men and women, which means the quick speak of HIV. A flip book-style chart showing this appears across chapters three and four, and is fascinating.

Ms. Epstein says AIDS is a serious public health problem that needs to be addressed through its social and political causes, not just through drug testing. She explores the tradition of community solidarity in Africa, and is convinced this capacity to help each other and endure is the key to fighting this scourge. She also examines the role of religion (both in the United States and in countries like Uganda) in fighting the virus, how foreign aid is like a bank machine, and the underground economy of AIDS. She urges industrialized nations to rethink their trade, development and foreign investment policies in order to help fix the economic problems, but her main thrust throughout the book is that AIDS will only be cured by social mobilization. Just like with the current fight against climate change, it is individuals and communities–not governments–that will have the greatest impact in changing the world.

The Invisible Cure is an interesting and very readable look at HIV/AIDS, charting its scientific history, critiquing how Western scientists presume to study the disease, and analyzing present-day grassroots social programs that are doing more to fight the virus than any vaccine ever will.