Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS
University of California Press/Milbank Memorial Fund, 2005 465 pp., hardcover, $44.95 ISBN 0520243501 | ISBN: 0-520-24350-1
Since the HIV/AIDS epidemic emerged 25 years ago, few subjects have received as much attention from medical and public health researchers. The complicated social and political responses generated by the epidemic in different countries and communities have also become the focus for an extensive literature in social science and historical research. But few volumes in this large scholarly literature come close to matching the detail and the sophistication of Peter Baldwin's remarkable study, Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS. Through a highly nuanced comparative analysis of the ways in which a range of different Western democracies have sought to respond to the epidemic, Baldwin's study provides not only the most extensive record of the ways in which the United States and a number of Western European nations have addressed HIV and AIDS, but also a far-reaching understanding of the different approaches that these countries have developed in relation to the politics of public health and its ongoing tensions between the defense of individual liberties and the need to safeguard the health of communities.
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