HIV

HIV/AIDS, an “Introduction to International Studies” class lecture

Mercator Map of the Congo, 1595, from the Northwestern University Library Maps of Africa collection, accessed through Wikipedia.

I wrote a book, the AIDS Pandemic in Latin America, and have studied public policy and infectious disease for nearly twenty years. Here is a lecture that I wrote (around 2010?) for an “Introduction to International Studies” class. It would need to be updated now; it may also some references to my own experiences, which would need to be removed. But my hope is that it might prove a useful starting place for someone who wants to do a lecture on this topic in a similar class.

Shawn Smallman

HIV/AIDS

Terms:

clades

HIV 1-B

HIV 2

Retrovirus

Cameroon

 

Character of the Virus:

  • HIV is not one virus but many
  • The result of more than one introduction into humanity
  • Two main forms: HIV-1; HIV-2
  • Great diversity
  • Difficult to create vaccine
  • 10 year latency
  • initial infection- blood/sex/mother daughter
  • flu-like symptoms
  • body holds the virus in check
  • over time, the virus gradually erodes the immune system’s ability to defend the body
  • the person dies of opportunistic infections
  • there are different latency periods for different people: my Cuban experience
  • medicines don’t work with everyone: my experience in the support group in Sao Paulo
  • most people, the medications are effective
  • recently realized: in a discordant couple medications prevent transmission in 98% of cases
  • means that treatment is prevention
  • heart-breaking: long argued that treatment was too expensive
  • the only economical way to treat the virus was prevention
  • proves to have been a flawed paradigm

Language and Loss

AIDS prevention tapes in Oaxaca’s Indigenous languages. Photo by Shawn Smallman. Tapes by Frente Común Contra el SIDA, Oaxaca, Mexico; courtesy of Bill Wolf.

When Kim Brown and wrote our textbook, we drafted one chapter on language that just didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the text. Still, we’ve included the chapter for free online on this website, in the hope that faculty may use it. I became fascinated with language while researching HIV prevention strategies in Oaxaca, Mexico, one of the most linguistically diverse places in the Americas. How do you do HIV prevention work in rural communities in which the primary language is not Spanish? I knew the co-founder of an HIV prevention organization (Frente Común Contra el SIDA), which produced and distributed audio cassettes that gave information about preventing HIV in a plethora of Oaxaca’s languages. The NGO sent young people back to their communities to interview elders. With their linguistic advice they would create these tapes in their local language. …

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