Meanwhile they have overlooked homegrown African initiatives aimed squarely at the behaviors spreading the virus. From the United Nations AIDS program to the Bush administration's historic relief campaign, global health officials have favored well-meaning Western approaches-condom promotion, abstinence campaigns, HIV testing, abstinence campaigns-that have proven ineffective in slowing the epidemic in Africa. Timberg and Halperin argue that the same Western hubris that marked the colonial era has hamstrung the effort to fight HIV. Equally devastating was the gradual loss of the African ritual of male circumcision, which recent studies have shown offers significant protection against infection. Christian missionaries campaigned to suppress polygamy, but left in its place fractured sexual cultures that proved uncommonly vulnerable to HIV. Western powers were key actors in turning a localized outbreak into a sprawling epidemic as bustling new trade routes, modern colonial cities, and the rise of prostitution sped the virus across Africa. It was here, during the age of european conquest, that humans first contracted the strain of HIV that would eventually cause 99 percent of AIDS deaths around the world. During the Scramble for Africa near the turn of the twentieth century, colonial companies blazed new routes through the jungle in search of rubber and other riches, sending African porters into remote regions rarely traveled before. Recent genetic discoveries have traced the birth of HIV to the forbidding equatorial forests of Cameroon, where chimpanzees carried a nearly identical virus for millennia without causing a major outbreak in humans. Drawing on remarkable new science, Tinderbox overturns the conventional wisdom on the origins of this deadly epidemic and the best ways to fight it today. Longtime Washington Post journalist Craig Timberg and award-winning AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin tell the surprising story of how western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and then fanned its rise. Their book is entertaining, thought-provoking, human, and in the end, hopeful for a continent that craves some answers after two decades of HIV prevention failures.” -Francois Venter, M.D., president, Southern African HIV Clinicians Society “Timberg and Halperin have been challenging conventional wisdom for years. , Bigsby Professor at U.C Berkeley and author of Ever Since Adam and Eve Tinderbox is every bit as good, revealing the same denial, the same story of politics trumping science, and the same tragedy. “Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On was the first-and for decades the best-book on AIDS. Tinderbox is an indictment of Western ineptitude and meddling and lost opportunities to prevent millions of infections and deaths." -Stephanie Nolen, author of 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa “Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin have written a searing book about the AIDS epidemic. Tinderbox brilliantly outlines the successes, failures, and missed opportunities in the battle of HIV prevention over the last thirty years." -Elly Katabira, M.D., President, International AIDS Society It's a fascinating read: relentlessly honest, sometimes scathing, alway principled." -Stephen Lewis, Founder/Director of AIDS-Free World, Former UN Special Envoy on AIDS in Africa With rare clarity, Tinderbox lays bare the origins of the AIDS virus, and then reveals the often hapless and delinquent responses of the international community. “The sometimes glorious, often tragic constellation of science, politics, and personalities in the fight against AIDS comes to life in the masterful storytelling of an energetic journalist and a passionate scientist.” -Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver
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