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'Love Carefully'

Africans against AIDS.

Jun 23, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 39 • By JENNIFER ROBACK MORSE
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The Invisible Cure

Africa, the West and the Fight Against AIDS

by Helen Epstein

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 352 pp., $26

Last year, the chief United Nations researchers on AIDS publicly admitted that the U.N. has consistently over-estimated the size of the AIDS epidemic. UNAIDS revised their estimates of the numbers of HIV cases worldwide downward from 40 million to 33 million, and cut the number of annual new HIV infections by more than 40 percent from previous estimates.

Skeptics wondered whether the history of consistent U.N. overstatement of the HIV problem was a deliberate ploy to raise more funds. Helen Epstein, author of The Invisible Cure, was not surprised: Her work shows beyond any doubt that the politics of AIDS often dominates the science of AIDS.

Trained in biology, Helen Epstein began her interest in HIV and AIDS with a postdoctoral project at the Uganda Cancer Institute in 1993, and her new book, based on a series of articles she wrote for the New York Review of Books between 1995 and 2006, is invaluable for anyone interested in the politics of AIDS in America. She argues that Western aid agencies are gravely culpable in their handling of the AIDS epidemic because they allowed their preconceived notions to interfere with their objective interpretation of the data. The Lifestyle Left comes off much worse than the Religious Right.

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