Socialising the Biomedical Turn in HIV Prevention

A compelling and wide-ranging study on why an informed and locally relevant social response to HIV is the only way forward

This book addresses the major challenge for HIV prevention: that is, to reach beyond the limitations of biomedical approaches to disease and to design prevention strategies informed by and connected with the social realities of people’s lives.

This book concerns HIV prevention.  In it the authors argue that until the world focuses its attention on the social issues carried and revealed by AIDS, it is unlikely that HIV transmission will be eradicated or even significantly reduced. The book argues that we are currently witnessing the remedicalisation or the continuing biomedicalisation of HIV prevention, which began in earnest after the development of successful HIV treatment, and that this biomedical trajectory continues with the increasing push to use HIV treatments as prevention, undermining what has been in many countries a successful prevention response. This wide-ranging study argues that HIV prevention involves enabling people and communities to discuss sex, sexuality and drug use and, informed by these discussion, devising locally effective strategies for promoting safe sexual and drug injection practices.