Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues

Written by Paul Farmer

Narrated by Derek Shoales

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor. This "peculiarly modern inequality" that permeates AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious diseases such as Ebola and cholera, is laid bare in Farmer's harrowing memoir rife with stories about diseases and human suffering.



Farmer points out that most current explanatory strategies, from "cost-effective treatment" to patient "noncompliance," inevitably lead to blaming the victims. In reality, larger forces, global as well as local, determine why some people are sick and others are shielded from risk. Farmer writes of what can be done in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, by physicians and medical students determined to treat those in need: whether in their home countries or through medical outreach programs like Doctors without Borders. Infections and Inequalities weds meticulous scholarship in medical anthropology with a passion for solutions—remedies for the plagues of the poor and the social illnesses that have sustained them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798765038369

Paul Farmer

Paul Farmer is co-founder of Partners In Health and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has authored numerous books, including Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and The New War on the Poor. Jim Yong Kim is co-founder of Partners In Health and the current President of the World Bank Group. Arthur Kleinman is Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of numerous influential works including The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition. Matthew Basilico is a medical student at Harvard Medical School and a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Malawi, where he has lived and worked with his wife Marguerite.

Reviews for Infections and Inequalities

[scottjpearson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Paul Farmer is a genius and is worthy of reading by anyone interested in his field of medical anthropology. An MD/PhD professor of Harvard and founder of Partners in Health, Farmer, perhaps better than anyone else alive, embodies the ethic that health care is a human right.

In this book, he writes on his experiences in Haiti. He writes of fighting AIDS and Tuberculosis. He points out that poverty is not only correlated with these diseases but is perhaps a cause. By his broad training, he spans two schools of thought about how to fight these diseases. Poverty must be fought, but so too must the diseases. That is, the diseases synergistically amplify the poverty, and poverty, in turn, amplifies the diseases.

Unfortunately, AIDS (sida in Haiti's Creole language) and TB form a synergy amongst each other that haunts the public health of this island-nation. Farmer's work is laudable as always, and the needless expense of human capital in Haiti at the hands of disease and poverty - yes, infections and inequalities - is an immense tragedy. One wonders how Haiti can prosper. Certainly more Paul Farmers would help.

[meggo_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If you are poor in Harlem, you are more likely to die of AIDS or tuberculosis just like poor people in Haiti or India. This book explores the effect that income and access to health care has on individuals' mortality and morbidity. Surprisingly, income, rather than geography, appears to play the significant role. Put another way, you are more likely to be sick and poor than sick and rich, and the diseases that kill the rich are very different than the diseases that kill the poor.