A comprehensive view of health issues currently plaguing Africa, with an emphasis on the HIV/AIDS pandemic. HIV/AIDS, Illness and African Well-Being highlights the specific health problems facing Africa today, most particularly the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the book presents not only various healthcrises, but also the larger historical and contemporary contexts within which they must be understood and managed. Chapters offering analysis of specific illness case studies, and the effects of globalization and underdevelopmenton health, provide an overarching context in which HIV/AIDS and other health-related concerns can be understood. The contributions on the HIV/AIDS pandemic grapple with the complications of national and international policies, thesociological effects of the pandemic, and policy options for the future. HIV/AIDS, Illness and African Well-Being thus provides a comprehensive view of health issues currently plaguing the continent and the many differentways that scholars are interpreting the health outlook in Africa. Contributors: Obijiofor Aginam, Yacouba Banhoro, Richard Beilock, Charity Chenga, Mandi Chikombero, Kaley Creswell, Freek Cronjé, Frank N. F. Dadzie, Gabriel B. Fosu, Stephen Obeng-Manu Gyimah, Kathryn H. Jacobsen, W. Bediako Lamousé-Smith, William N. Mkanta, Gerald M. Mumma, Kalala Ngalamulume, Raphael Chijioke Njoku, Cecilia S. Obeng, Iruka N. Okeke, Akpen Philip, Baffour K. Takyi, Melissa K. Van Dyke, Sophie Wertheimer, Ellen A. S. Whitney Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas atAustin. Matthew M. Heaton is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

The AIDS epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa continues to affect all facets of life throughout the subcontinent. Deaths related to AIDS have driven down the life expectancy rate of residents in Zambia, Kenya, and Uganda with far-reaching implications. This book details the current state of the AIDS epidemic in Africa and what is known about the behaviors that contribute to the transmission of the HIV infection. It lays out what research is needed and what is necessary to design more effective prevention programs.

Within two volumes, more than 400 signed entries and their associated bibliographies and recommended readings authoritatively cover issues in both the historical and contemporary context of health services research.

Today’s era of intense globalization has unleashed dynamic movements of people, pathogens, and pests that overwhelm the static territorial jurisdictions on which the governance provided by sovereign states and their formal intergovernmental institutions is based. This world of movement calls for new ideas and institutions to govern people’s health, above all in Africa, where the movements and health challenges are the most acute. This book insightfully explores these challenges in ways that put the perspectives of Africans themselves at centre stage. It begins with the long central and still compelling African health challenge of combating the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. It then examines the global governance responses by the major multilateral organizations of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and the newer informal flexible democratically oriented ones of the Group of Eight. It also addresses the compounding health challenge created by climate change to assess both its intensifying impact on Africa and how all international institutions have largely failed to link climate and health in their governance response. It concludes with several recommendations about the innovative ideas and institutions that offer a way to closing the great global governance gaps and thus improving Africans’ health and that of citizens beyond.

HIV/AIDS is a catastrophe globally but nowhere more so than in sub-Saharan Africa, which in 2008 accounted for 67 percent of cases worldwide and 91 percent of new infections. The Institute of Medicine recommends that the United States and African nations move toward a strategy of shared responsibility such that these nations are empowered to take ownership of their HIV/AIDS problem and work to solve it.

Examines the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic through creative texts and the impact of these representations in determining which issues receive attention and how public understanding of the virus is shaped. South Africa is one of the countries in the world most affected by HIV/AIDS, and yet, until recently, the epidemic was barely visible in South African literature. Much can be gained from approaching the South African epidemic through creative texts such as novels, photographs, films, cartoons and murals because they produce and circulate meanings of HIV/AIDS and its various facets such as its 'origin', 'transmission routes' and 'physical manifestations'. Other aspects explored are the denial of HIV/AIDS, its stigmatisation, discriminatory practices, modes of disclosure, access to anti-retroviral medication, as well as the role of alternative treatment. Creative texts, which are open to different and possibly contradictory readings, can serve as a starting point to increase the cultural visibility of the virus and to challenge dominant ideas about the epidemic. The cultural constructions of HIV/AIDS should be carefully examined because the meanings are pervasive and have very 'real' consequences: they play a powerful role both in determining which issues receive attention and in shaping public understanding of the virus. Ellen Grünkemeier is a lecturer and researcher in the English Department at Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany. Her publications include two co-edited volumes on postcolonial literatures and cultures, Listening to Africa. Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures (2012), and Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines (ASNEL Papers 19, forthcoming).