Based on interviews with women who are HIV positive, this sobering pandemic brings to light the deeply rooted and complex problems of living with HIV. Already pushed to the edges of society by poverty, racial politics, and gender injustice, women with HIV in South Africa have found ways to cope with work and men, disclosure of their HIV status, and care for families and children to create a sense of normalcy in their lives. As women take control of their treatment, they help to determine effective routes to ending the spread of the disease.

This book addresses the ongoing problem of HIV in black South African women as a health inequity. Importantly, it argues that this urgent problem of justice is changeable. Sprague uses the capabilities approach to bring a theory of health justice, together with multiple sources of evidence, to investigate the complex problem of HIV and accompanying poor health outcomes in black South African women. Motivated by a concern for application of knowledge, this work discusses how to better conceptualise what health justice demands of state and society, and how to mobilise available evidence on health inequities in ways that compel greater state action to address problems of gender and health. HIV in women, and possible responses, are investigated on four distinct levels: conceptual, social structure, health systems, and law. The analysis demonstrates that this problem is indeed modifiable with long-term interventions and an enhanced state response targeted at multiple levels. This book will be of interest to academics and students in the social health sciences, gender and development studies, and global health, as well as HIV/health activists, government officials, policy makers, HIV clinicians and health providers interested in HIV.

Index words. HIV/AIDS, South Africa, women, relationship power

There are about 34 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS. Half are women. There has been a dramatic global increase in the rates of women living with HIV/AIDS. Among young women, especially in developing countries, infection rates are rapidly increasing. Many of these women are also mothers with young infants. When a woman is labeled as having HIV, she is treated with suspicion and her morality is being questioned. Previous research has suggested that women living with HIV/AIDS can be affected by delay in diagnosis, inferior access to health care services, internalized stigma and a poor utilization of health services. This makes it extremely difficult for women to take care of their own health needs. Women are also reluctant to disclose their HIV-positive status as they fear this may result in physical feelings of shame, social ostracism, violence, or expulsion from home. Women living with HIV/AIDS who are also mothers carry a particularly heavy burden of being HIV-infected. This unique book attempts to put together results from empirical research and focuses on issues relevant to women, motherhood and living with HIV/AIDS which have occurred to individual women in different parts of the globe. The book comprises chapters written by researchers who carry out their projects in different parts of the world, and each chapter contains empirical information based on real life situations. This can be used as evidence for health care providers to implement socially and culturally appropriate services to assist individuals and groups who are living with HIV/AIDS in many societies. The book is of interest to scholars and students in the domains of anthropology, sociology, social work, nursing, public health & medicine and health professionals who have a specific interest in issues concerning women who are mothers and living with HIV/AIDS from cross-cultural perspective.

This second edition of the book provides up-to-date information on new drugs, new proven HIV prevention interventions, a new chapter on positive prevention, and current HIV epidemiology. This definitive text covers all aspects of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, from basic science to medicine, sociology, economics and politics. It has been written by a highly respected team of South African HIV/AIDS experts and provides a thoroughly researched account of the epidemic in the region.

South Africa has the world's largest number of people living with HIV. This book offers a history of AIDS activism in South Africa from its origins in gay and anti-apartheid activism to the formation and consolidation of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), including its central role in the global HIV treatment access movement.