A passionate appeal for Global equality in AIDS treatment.

AuthorPont, Amy
PositionMoving Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS - Book review

MOVING MOUNTAINS: THE RACE TO TREAT GLOBAL AIDS

By Anne-Christine D'Adesky

(ISBN 1-84467-543-2) Published by Verso, 2004

Do industrialized nations want to supply HIV/AIDS medicine at low costs to developing countries? Anne-Christine D'Adesky, a journalist and HIV/AIDS activist, would say no. In her book, Moving Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS, she explores the politics behind the pharmaceutical-government relations and regional efforts to combat the epidemic. This first-hand account illustrates the obstacles to providing HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment to those already affected with the virus in developing countries.

Moving Mountains is not a numerical, fact-based book. Instead of just giving figures, the author also tells personalized stories that illustrate the larger picture. "These are numbing, staggering statistics; the numbers become abstractions. But each one is a life, a member of a family. Whenever it gets too big, I break it down, think of this person I met or that one." She also localizes the issues, showing that HIV/AIDS is a global epidemic, but illustrating the fact that each country faces different issues.

Ms. D'Adesky recounts her visits to many resource-poor regions of the world and exposes the political clout and specific social issues that prevent the scaling-up of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. With such chapter subtitles as "Does the WHO want generics?" and "Vaccine Dreams". she poses the controversial question of why treatments and prevention are not available. Government leaders, specifically in the United States, place universal access to treatments second to economic interests, according to the author, who walks the fine line of political correctness by contextualizing statistical data of the pandemic and then providing evidence against former United States leaders. An HIV/AIDS activist group called ACT UP "launched its first protests against the high price of AZT--a former cancer drug approved for AIDS in March 1987--at a cost of $10,000 a year" she says. "Ronald Regan was in office then, and 20,000 Americans had already died of AIDS." In addition, she reveals the effects of the unavailability of HIV/AIDS prevention drugs, while placing them in a historic context.

Ms. D'Adesky is also the producer/director of the documentary, "Pills, Profit, Protest: Chronicle of the Global AIDS Movement", which captures AIDS activists at the front line in the battle against the profit-motivated political influence...

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