HIV/AIDS: Global Frontiers in Prevention/Intervention

"Cynthia Pope, Renee T. White, and Robert Malow, in collaboration with an interprofessional team of 108 colleagues, offer a compendium of essays and articles that advance our understanding of the complex challenges that HIV/AIDS poses for public health practitioners and public health infrastructure globally. The book includes contributions from professionals, advocates and HIV activists who have made HIV and AIDS their life's work. Contributors include internationally respected experts in their respective fields as well as emerging voices that will carry the dialogue of HIV and its influence on human populations and environments into the future. This book covers emerging issues in HIV risk, prevention, and treatment. It includes sections on (a) evolving theories of harm reduction and HIV risk, (b) gender, sexuality, and HIV risk, (c) critical intersections between biomedicine, behaviour, and HIV, (d) exploration of new forms of intervention and prevention, (e) social structural policy responses to HIV, (f) the role of the media in HIV/AIDS, (g) HIV vulnerabilities and vulnerable populations, (h) living and caring for persons with HIV/AIDS, and a concluding section dedicated to (i) globalizing theory on HIV/AIDS for the future. Each section opens with a framing essay to provide students of public health, related professions, and the lay reader with context for the discussion that unfolds. The editors have skillfully selected exemplars from the broad geographies and perspectives that influence persons affected by HIV disease. Not only does the book discuss the geographical and geopolitical environments around the globe that provide the contexts in which HIV exists and sometimes flourishes, but it also covers the internal geographies of persons living with HIV disease. This internal or human geography highlights the complexities of the interrelationships between host and disease vector and how these factors become more complex when viewed from the spatial and temporal elements of the broader global environments."

-- Craig Phillips, University of British Columbia, Nurse Education Today, January 2009

"In this original edition of HIV/AIDS: Global Frontiers in Prevention/Intervention, Cynthia Pope, Renee T. White, and Robert Malow provide an impressive examination of HIV/AIDS from a historical, social, political, and biomedical perspective while transcending issues of culture, gender, and global impact. By making minimal assumptions about the reader’s knowledge and with an outstanding range of insightful articles, the editors make accessible a comprehensive and highly readable introduction to HIV and AIDS on a global scale…The editors begin with an overview that addresses global convergences and emerging issues in HIV risk, prevention, and treatment. This overview, with its discussion of the importance of using an interdisciplinary and structural approach to the conceptualization of the complex dynamics that encourage or mitigate HIV prevention, transmission, and treatment worldwide, provides the foundation for the remainder of the book. As the title clearly implies, Pope, White, and Malow methodically explore the omnipresent concept of HIV/AIDS from a global viewpoint in terms of evolving theories of harm and risk reduction, gender and sexuality, the interrelationship of biomedicine and behavior, exploration of new forms of intervention and prevention, policies of justice, media and HIV, vulnerable populations, caring for individuals with HIV/ AIDS, and globalizing theory on HIV/AIDS. To achieve this noteworthy and comprehensive goal, the book is divided into nine sections and has a total of 37 chapters. Each section begins with a framing essay that sets the stage for the chapters within the section…The editors conclude this comprehensive overview of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic with a section addressing the concept of a globalizing theory on HIV/ AIDS and frameworks for future prevention and intervention. The last of the nine framing essays focuses on the global impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in terms of other large-scale social and economic processes, many of which have been addressed throughout this voluminous text... In this textbook and reference, Pope, White, and Malow have meticulously assembled a resource that offers myriad cutting-edge issues in HIV/AIDS research, policy making, and advocacy from a global perspective… Without question, this book provides a wealth of information and presents a unitary geographical, sociological, and public health frame of reference for the analysis of HIV/AIDS prevention and intervention on a global scale."

-- Eric Fenkl, Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor, Florida International University, Miami, JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION OF NURSES IN AIDS CARE, Vol. 20, No. 3, May/June 2009