The AIDS Conspiracy is essential reading for anyone who is curious about why some people will not accept scientific facts about the nature, origin and lethality of HIV.
In this important book, Nattrass, an AIDS expert at Yale and Cape Town University, deftly examines widespread misconceptions about the origin, transmission, and health effects of AIDS. She compares the situation in South Africa, where AIDS denialism was institutionalized at the highest levels of government (leading to 333,000 unnecessary AIDS deaths), with a host of conspiracy theories circulating in the United States. Nattrass frames her thesis cogently: “The important issue here is not whether the ‘AIDS as genocidal bio-weapon’ claims are wrong (which they are), but rather why they were, and remain, thinkable for many people.” She asks the same question about other equally erroneous beliefs such as that HIV is harmless. Her analysis focuses on four symbolic figures responsible for promoting misinformation: the hero scientist (a dissident scientist taking on the medical establishment), the cultropreneur (someone hawking alternative and unproven therapies), the living icon (a person claiming to be living proof that AIDS cannot cause harm), and the praise-singer (a journalist who promotes the antiscientific view of the disease). The ways in which the scientific community has challenged each of these figures should help inform future scientific debates, such as the one over vaccines, which, as Nattrass so well demonstrates, is where the battle between science and myth is very similar. (Mar.)
a highly accessible, impeccably referenced, scholarly work, which should be essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the role of conspiracy theories in the social and political history of the AIDS epidemic.
A must read for anyone interested in confronting the anti-science backlash causing so many unnecessary deaths across the globe.
A rigorous and illuminating investigation into the anatomy of AIDS conspiracies, this book ought to be read by anybody interested in the relationship between science and ordinary people.
Nicoli Nattrass's book is long overdue. She provides a comprehensive, definitive rebuttal to the genocide that AIDS denialism continues to propagate around the world. Nattrass succeeds in educating the public and arming them with truth based on proven science -- not pseudoscience. Nattrass should be widely commended for her work.
Nicoli Nattrass does a wonderful job uncovering the dangerous consequences of following fringe ideas in health and medicine. Her new book puts medical myths and misinformation square in front of us, and she tells the story with such passion, we dare not look away.
a highly accessible, impeccably referenced, scholarly work, which should be essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the role of conspiracy theories in the social and political history of the AIDS epidemic.
Neil Bennet
The AIDS Conspiracy is essential reading for anyone who is curious about why some people will not accept scientific facts about the nature, origin and lethality of HIV.
Robin A. Weiss
Nattrass (economics, Univ. of Cape Town) here exposes the antiscience consequences of AIDS denialism and AIDS conspiracy theories. By claiming that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, denialists undermine HIV prevention work and cause more infections among adherents by influencing them not to take precautions against HIV. Thousands died in South Africa when President Thabo Mbeki advised citizens not to take antiretroviral drugs. Nattrass describes the strong social components of AIDS denialism, which typically centers on four players: the hero scientist (e.g., denialist Peter Duesberg), the "cultropreneur" (e.g., those who exploit HIV patients by condemning antiretroviral medicine and selling herbal remedies instead), the living icon (HIV-positive people who offer themselves as proof that HIV doesn't cause AIDS), and the praise singer, such as those who produce films praising the denialism. VERDICT Focusing mostly on the United States and South Africa, this book is readable and compelling though written in a scholarly style. A remarkably well-argued case against unscientific approaches to AIDS and a brilliant defense of evidence-based medicine. A must-read for all who study AIDS history.—Jeffrey Beall, Univ. of Colorado at Denver Lib.