This book by Susan Hunter, published in 2003, is a book written for a "lay" audience about the AIDS crisis in Africa. The author has spent 20+ years in Africa, working with UNAIDS, UNICEF and USAID specifically addressing the AIDS issue.

She has written a book that is pretty easy to understand, but harder to digest. She weaves stories of Charles Darwin in with discussions of colonialism, vectors, disease transmission, the role of money and more education on epidemics than I think I got in nursing school. She has personal stories of people in Africa and their dealings with HIV/AIDS (always one word there), which really help you grasp the big picture.

That big picture is frightening. HIV/AIDS infection rates are soaring. In fact, a news article out of South Africa just this week points to the growing problem:

HIV is the main driving force behind South Africa's high child death rates and unless there is a concerted effort to put child survival strategies in place the country faces an "unstoppable wave of child mortality"... Dr Harry Moultrie of the Harriet Shezi Children's Clinic at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital said it was critical for the PMTCT programme to function optimally as the health system would not cope with the rising number of HIV positive children. He said one third of children were dying by the time they reached 12 months.

Of course, the HIV/AIDS crisis is multi-factorial - it's not "simply" a matter of providing ARV's to the millions currently infected. There are transportation issues - how do you get the medications to the people who need them most? There are food issues - it's been blogged on several times, but the malnutrition rate in Africa is staggering - how do you take meds that require food, when there is no food? How well can they work when your diet consists of one thing - corn meal? How do you move past the stigma that prevents people from talking about HIV/AIDS other than in a general context, as a disease that only happens to "other people"? How do you overcome literally generations of the de-valuing of women, to let them actually have some say in their sexual life? Or to overcome such grinding poverty that the only way to get school fees for the kids is to trade sexual favors (and as a side note - doesn't it strike you as sad that the richest country in the world has free K-12 schooling for all and the poorest countries in the world have mandatory school fees?)

There are no easy answers, but the author has no problem calling the world to task for their (large) role in this pandemic that threatens an entire continent and even, in her words, the "well being of the entire human species".