Nicoli Nattrass's The AIDS Conspiracy: Science Fights Back PDF

Since the early days of the AIDS epidemic, many extraordinary and unsafe hypotheses were complicated to give an explanation for the origins of the ailment. during this compelling e-book, Nicoli Nattrass explores the social and political components prolonging the misguided trust that the yank executive synthetic the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) for use as a organic weapon, in addition to the myth's outcomes for habit, specifically inside of African American and black South African communities.

Contemporary AIDS denialism, the idea that HIV is innocuous and that antiretroviral medications are the real reason behind AIDS, is a extra insidious AIDS conspiracy thought. Advocates of this place make a "conspiratorial circulation" opposed to HIV technological know-how through implying its equipment can't be relied on and that untested, substitute remedies are more secure than antiretrovirals. those claims are really life-threatening, as tragically tested in South Africa whilst the hold up of antiretroviral therapy ended in approximately 333,000 AIDS deaths and 180,000 HIV infections—a tragedy of wonderful proportions.

Nattrass identifies 4 symbolically robust figures making sure the lifespan of AIDS denialism: the hero scientist (dissident scientists who lend credibility to the movement); the cultropreneur (alternative therapists who take advantage of the conspiratorial movement as a advertising mechanism); the residing icon (individuals who declare to be case in point of AIDS denialism's legitimacy); and the praise-singer (journalists who broadcast flow messages to the public). Nattrass additionally describes how pro-science activists have fought again via deploying empirical facts and political credibility to withstand AIDS conspiracy theories, that's a part of the the most important venture to shield evidence-based medicine.