The first guide to discuss all aspects of being HIV-positive, The Essential AIDS Fact Book remains the only short and accessible book to concentrate on early intervention strategies, and gather in one place all the information available on testing, monitoring, and living with HIV and AIDS. This new edition offers the most up-to-date medical advances and practical techniques for containing and combating the deadly virus.

The authors of The Essential AIDS Fact Book suggest ways to control the HIV virus while more effective treatments are being developed. Sections include HIV Antibody Testing; Obtaining Treatment; Health Care Strategies; Drugs that Help; Living with HIV; Managing Complications; and more.

An updated edition of Jacques Pépin's acclaimed account of the events that transformed a chimpanzee virus into a global pandemic.

Contains practical advice for updating a school library collection describing why it is important and how to use automation tools to make the job easier.

Few people realize that the familiar HIV/AIDS global statistics are actually estimates. For example, UNAIDS estimated that the Republic of South Africa had 140,000 HIV/AIDS deaths in 1997. However, after tabulating all deaths for 1997, the Republic of South Africa attributed only 6,635 deaths to HIV/AIDS. Such discrepancies are rarely noted. The Republic of South Africa (RSA) stands as the exemplar of these discrepancies, and is reputed to have the world's largest AIDS epidemic with an estimated 5.6 million people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWH) in 2008. Such PLWH estimates, as with the estimates of HIV/AIDS deaths, are highly questionable. The reasons behind these discrepancies are clarified by describing two common misunderstandings of HIV infection that contribute to poor mathematical modeling outcomes. Unfortunately, the health authorities in the Republic of South Africa grant more validity to computer-generated estimates than to their own empirical death counts. The author discusses why these modeled estimates, and the HIV sero-prevalence surveys upon which they are based, are simply implausible. Presented with full references are raw numerical data on: the tabulated number of HIV/AIDS deaths in the RSA; the number of AIDS cases detected by RSA disease surveillance systems; UNAIDS/WHO estimates for AIDS deaths in the RSA; and UNAIDS/WHO estimates for the number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the RSA. The total cumulative HIV/AIDS cases in the United States and Africa are also presented for comparison, and to place the African and RSA data within appropriate epidemiological context. Overall, these data span from 1981 to 2009. Altogether, these data, plus additional information detailing the nature of HIV infection and heterosexual HIV transmission rates, explain why the hyperbolic mathematical estimates and HIV antibody test surveys - the primary sources of HIV/AIDS data in Africa - are simply implausible.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.