Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Elizabeth Pisani’s The Wisdom of Whores - Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS is a great book (along with a great website). Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist with years of experience working on HIV/AIDS (or sex and drugs, as she puts, which sounds a lot, well, sexier) at a variety of agencies, including UNAIDS. The book is the story of her frustrations at the way the international community, national governments, NGOS and AIDS activists have dealt with the epidemics, as well as her hopes in some of the progress made.

I got interested in the book when I read an interview Pisani gave to the Guardian. The interview kinda billed the book as a controversial work where Pisani would be the mean lady who said people got AIDS because of their stupid behavior and not enough was being done because of political correctness. So, I was ready to get really pissed off with the book. That has not been the case at all.  Read more 

This interview made me cringe quite a few times but it gives food for thought. Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist specialized in HIV/AIDS. She has worked for the World Bank, the WHO, UNAIDS, the CDC, and other organizations. She certainly has claims to the title of expert on HIV/AIDS. She has recently published a new book with a provocative title: The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of Aids (someone knows how to make alliterations!).  Read more 

“several Africans who had worked at the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville (LMS) during the 1950s. These witnesses reported that tissue culture had indeed been prepared at the LMS, that it had been prepared “mainly from chimpanzees”, and that moreover the head of the virology department, Paul Osterrieth, had been “making the polio vaccines” in his lab.”

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From Think Progress, who are astonished that the right-wing Reaganites (remember, Reagan fought his own Surgeon General regarding HIV and AIDS, and whether the public health threat the virus and diseases posed should receive federal funding to identify and treat and prevent):

In a column titled “Callous Conservative” in today’s Washington Post, former Bush White House aide Michael Gerson criticizes Fred Thompson’s stance on international AIDS funding.

At a campaign stop last week, Thompson was asked if he, “as a Christian, as a conservative,” supported President Bush’s global AIDS initiative.Thompson said there are larger “problems” at home and that it was not his “priority” to fund HIV/AIDS efforts in Africa:

“Christ didn’t tell us to go to the government and pass a bill to get some of these social problems dealt with. He told us to do it,” Thompson responded. “The government has its role, but we need to keep firmly in mind the role of the government, and the role of us as individuals and as Christians on the other.”

“I’m not going to go around the state and the country with regards to a serious problem and say that I’m going to prioritize that. With people dying of cancer, and heart disease, and children dying of leukemia still, I got to tell you — we’ve got a lot of problems here…”

But the right wing is outraged at Gerson, rather than Thompson.

The right wing wants people who are brown to die.
They don’t care how it happens or why it happens.
They don’t care whether bullets, bombs, or bugs kill brown people, just as long as none of those things threaten their shiny white fannies.

AIDS has taken a devastating toll around the world, but in Africa it has done perhaps its cruelest damage, because it has laid waste young adults — leaving children without parents; leaving elderly people without children; leaving whole nations without a workforce aged 25-60, on a continent where the ravages of  Read more 

Now that Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has compared himself to Jesus Christ perhaps he should inquire, “What would Jesus do about victims of AIDS.”

Clearly, that was not Huckabee’s train of thought back in 1992.  Read more