HIV scale-up and the politics of global health

摘要

HIV has a political and social history that is unlike any other disease in modern times. As we move forward into the fourth decade of responses to AIDS, it is impossible not to view the pandemic in terms of its sociopolitical, as well as epidemiological, evolution. The AIDS activist movements that began in the late 1980s indelibly shaped our collective understanding of HIV and the public responses it mandated (Parker, 2000,2011; Smith & Siplon, 2006). Activist and civil society movements bravely appropriated and challenged scientific process (Epstein, 1996), built dynamic and flexible transnational movements for treatment access (Petchesky, 2003) and forcefully demanded that governments address HIV by breaking through the most trenchant social prejudices and mitigating the inequalities driving infections (Berkman, Garcia, Munoz Laboy, Paiva, & Parker, 2005; Parker, 2009, 2011). Elsewhere, especially in the Global South, quieter forms of solidarity were also forged, as AIDS service organisations (ASOs) developed community-based care models that broke through stigma and assuaged suffering (Altman, 1994; Daniel & Parker, 1993; Rau, 2006).