The story of America's unlikeliest, least-known, yet greatest achievement this millennium: containing AIDS in Africa. As of 2003, there were nearly 27 million men, women, and children suffering from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. Today that number has been reduced by more than half. The number of people with access to antiretroviral drugs--a treatment which renders AIDS survivable rather than fatal--has gone from around 50,000 to more than 11 million. All of this is thanks to a Bush administration program known as PEPFAR. Even on the day of its launch during the 2003 State of the Union, no one much noticed it. It cost a fraction of a percentage of the overall budget and was far less expensive than the Iraq war, effectively announced on the same day. Yet PEPFAR is, according to journalist Emily Bass, "the best thing America has done beyond our borders in this century." To End a Plague is not merely a history of this extraordinary program; it describes the cost of success in our broken political system. PEPFAR was likely a cynical political ploy--a "legislative trophy" as the New York Times described it--and its overseers, including the now-famous Coronavirus Task Force leader Deborah Birx--had to make moral and political compromises to keep it from being shut down. Yet the program has persevered and made an enormous improvement in millions of lives. This is the story of true change and what it takes to make it.

"An engrossing exposé of scientific practice in America.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS From the authors of the New York Times bestselling Plague of Corruption comes the prescription on how to end the plague infecting our medical community. Ending Plague continues the New York Times bestselling team of Dr. Judy A. Mikovits and Kent Heckenlively with legendary scientist, Dr. Francis W. Ruscetti joining the conversation. Dr. Ruscetti is credited as one of the founding fathers of human retrovirology. In 1980, Dr. Ruscetti’s team isolated the first pathogenic human retrovirus, HTLV-1. Ruscetti would eventually go on to work for thirty-eight years at the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Ruscetti was deeply involved in performing some of the most critical HIV-AIDS research in the 1980s, pioneered discoveries in understanding the workings of the human immune system in the 1990s, isolating a new family of mouse leukemia viruses linked to chronic diseases in 2009, and offers his insights into the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In 1991, Ruscetti received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Ruscetti offers a true insider’s portrait of nearly four decades at the center of public health. His insights into the successes and failures of government science will be eye-opening to the general public. You will read never-before-revealed information about the personalities and arguments which have been kept from view behind the iron curtain of public health. Can we say our scientists are protecting us, or is another agenda at work? For most of his decades at the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Ruscetti has been in almost daily contact with his long-time collaborator, Dr. Mikovits, and their rich intellectual discussions will greatly add to our national discussion. Science involves a rigorous search for truth, and you will come to understand how science scholars are relentless in their quest for answers.

From the acclaimed author of Miracle Cure and The Third Horseman, the epic story of the collision between one of nature's smallest organisms and history's mightiest empire During the golden age of the Roman Empire, Emperor Justinian reigned over a territory that stretched from Italy to North Africa. It was the zenith of his achievements and the last of them. In 542 AD, the bubonic plague struck. In weeks, the glorious classical world of Justinian had been plunged into the medieval and modern Europe was born. At its height, five thousand people died every day in Constantinople. Cities were completely depopulated. It was the first pandemic the world had ever known and it left its indelible mark: when the plague finally ended, more than 25 million people were dead. Weaving together history, microbiology, ecology, jurisprudence, theology, and epidemiology, Justinian's Flea is a unique and sweeping account of the little known event that changed the course of a continent.

From the the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Part detective story, part historical epic—a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague ravaging a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire. It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria—the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire—located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives—brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria—the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island—an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And then a murder occurs. As the plague continues its rapid spread, the Sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island’s governor and local administration and the people’s refusal to respect the bans doom the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the Sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingheria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves. Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago, with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.

“Randy Shilts and Laurie Garrett told the story of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through the late 1980s and the early 1990s, respectively. Now journalist-historian-activist Emily Bass tells the story of US engagement in HIV/AIDS control in sub-Saharan Africa. There is far to go on the path, but Bass tells us how far we’ve come.” —Sten H. Vermund, professor and dean, Yale School of Public Health With his 2003 announcement of a program known as PEPFAR, George W. Bush launched an astonishingly successful American war against a global pandemic. PEPFAR played a key role in slashing HIV cases and AIDS deaths in sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the brink of epidemic control. Resilient in the face of flatlined funding and political headwinds, PEPFAR is America’s singular example of how to fight long-term plague—and win. To End a Plague is not merely the definitive history of this extraordinary program; it traces the lives of the activists who first impelled President Bush to take action, and later sought to prevent AIDS deaths at the whims of American politics. Moving from raucous street protests to the marbled halls of Washington and the clinics and homes where Ugandan people living with HIV fight to survive, it reveals an America that was once capable of real and meaningful change—and illuminates imperatives for future pandemic wars. Exhaustively researched and vividly written, this is the true story of an American moonshot.

This book thoroughly revisits divination as a central phenomenon in the lives of ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. It collects studies from many periods in Graeco-Roman history, from the Archaic period to the late Roman, and touches on many different areas of this rich topic, including treatments of dice oracles, sortition in both pagan and Christian contexts, the overlap between divination and other interpretive practices in antiquity, the fortunes of independent diviners, the activity of Delphi in ordering relations with the dead, the role of Egyptian cult centers in divinatory practices, and the surreptitious survival of recipes for divination by corpses. It also reflects a ranges of methodologies, drawn from anthropology, history of religions, intellectual history, literary studies, and archaeology, epigraphy, and paleography. It will be of particular interest to scholars and student of ancient Mediterranean religions.

Have you looked around at the world and felt as though everything was falling apart? America is struggling economically and no one has any answers. Unemployment has been over 9% for over two years now. It feels like the government is trying to take control of our lives. There is speculation that Greece might collapse economically, and, if they do, other European countries will follow suit. The Middle East is in total chaos and very unstable, with all these people rioting in the streets and wreaking havoc on their respective countries, along with dictators falling and rising from power. Iran is still telling everyone they are intent on annihilating Israel as they improve their nuclear capabilities. As Christians, our hope is in Jesus Christ; we know that our God is sovereign, so all the chaos in the world has no effect on how God brings the world to an end. But the end is in sight, and people are looking for something certain in this world. There are so many questions Christians have regarding End Times Prophecy and do not understand, simply because the church has not fulfilled its purpose in rightly dividing the Word of truth for the saints. The Complete Layman's Guide to End Times Prophecy will bring together all the questions one might have regarding the end of the world and the return of the Warrior King Jesus Christ to this earth to set up His millennial kingdom. This book is clear, concise, and cogent in its message and attempts to address all End Times Prophecy questions. Doctor Robert Ramirez, B.A. Political Science, College of Santa Fe; B.A. Pastoral Studies Moody Bible Institute; MDiv, The Master's Seminary; DMin, Trinity Southwest University; Pastor, Alive In Christ Bible Church; President and Founder, New Mexico Bible Institute & Bookstore