Infections and inequalities: the modern plagues

Abstract

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. What is it like to be a doctor to the poor, observing with an anthropologist's eye the harsh juxtapositions of excess and misery? Moving regularly from the teaching hospitals of Harvard, themselves abutting urban poverty, to a clinic in the hills of Haiti's Central Plateau, Farmer has experienced firsthand the peculiarly modern inequality that seems inseparable from AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious diseases such as Ebola and cholera. In his stories of sickness and suffering, Farmer challenges the accepted methodologies of epidemiology and international health. He argues that most current explanations, from cost-effectiveness to patient non-compliance, inevitably lead to blaming the victims. This moving account is far from a hopeless inventory of insoluble problems. Farmer tells us what can be done in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, by physicians determined to treat those in need. Deeply humane and harrowing in its detail, Infections and Inequalities weds meticulous scholarship with a passion for solutions-remedies for the plagues of the poor and the social maladies that have sustained them. The war against the plagues of the modern world, along with remedies for the plagues of the poor & the social maladies that have sustained them.

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