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The AIDS Crisis: A Documentary History. Douglas A. Feldman and Julia Wang Miller. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. 266 pp.
Since the reporting of the first cases of a then unknown illness in North America and Central Africa in the early 1980s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has spread throughout the world. As of December 1998, the United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that there are 33.4 million people living with AIDS; another 13. 9 million people have died of HIV-related illness since the beginning of the epidemic. Paralleling this dramatic spread of the biological agent HIV have been a wide range of political and sociocultural responses, from grassroots mobilization among affected communities to discrimination against people with or perceived to be with HIV/AIDS to the development of a multi-billion dollar per year global HIV/AIDS treatment and research industry. Over the years, AIDS awareness and HIV risk reduction practices have tended to increase, while the hysteria that accompanied the early stages of the epidemic has greatly diminished. Yet, according to UNAIDS, 11 new HIV transmissions occur each minute. And despite recent dramatic advances in treating HIV-related illness through combination anti-retroviral therapies, there is still no definitive cure for AIDS, and the newer treatments remain financially out of reach of the vast majority of HIV+ people in the world. Seen in this light, and as The AIDS Crisis: A Documentary History persuasively and movingly demonstrates, the AIDS crisis is by no means over; in fact, in the absence of a massive...