AIDS: The Challenge : Understanding, Education and Care

AIDS is a dynamic, evolving epidemic, numerically, socially and geographically. Ignorance, denial and prejudice have been dominant features of our response. But the epidemic has also prompted new ways of thinking about how we understand the interface between illness, society and the individual. In this study, the author locates the AIDS epidemic in the context of changing times and of a changing world. Focusing on the experience of the epidemic in the UK and USA, he looks at how we have talked about the epidemic and how we have sought, through research, to understand its social meaning. He considers the way prevention, through health education, has developed, and looks at the complex way caring about and caring for people with AIDS is manifest. AIDS presents huge challenges, medically and socially. But the response to AIDS has included much that we can learn from and emulate.