WHITE PLAGUE

Gripping and sobering, this is a provocative and long-overdue reassessment of the science and history of AIDS. This book will show how events far from Africa transformed the virus from a rare disease into the greatest pandemic of the twentieth century. It will explore previous taboo aspects of the history of AIDS and will create a major shift in our understanding of the forces that shaped the AIDS pandemic.

Conventional wisdom tells us that AIDS began with an encounter between an African hunter and a chimpanzee sometime during the first half of the 20th century and then spread from the rainforest to the rest of the world. Health researcher Stephen Minkin acknowledges that HIV has distant African roots, but that the general consensus on the history, geography and timeline of the pandemic is not supported by DNA footprints. WHITE PLAGUE is a riveting medical detective story that unites prodigious scientific research at the intersection between epidemiology and political, social and cultural developments. It portrays the confluence of technological, cultural, and political events that freed the virus to move beyond previous biological constraints. From its beginning in Vienna in 1870, the rise of smallpox vaccinations during the Franco-Prussian War, developments in blood-banking during World War II, the Vietnam War, organized crime, the heroin epidemic of the 1970s to the explosive growth of AIDS in gay men, WHITE PLAGUE is a book about history that has the potential to make history. The book will be a veritable game-changer, sparking new lines of research by opening the door to vastly richer, startling and often counterintuitive insights into the dynamics of AIDS and other pandemics such as Ebola. Based on Steve Minkin's work, the Chairman of the Department of Health Sciences Research at the Mayo Clinic decided to launch a study of patients seen between 1920 and 1960 who were identified by the author as potentially clinically suspicious for AIDS. Stephen F. Minkin has more than thirty years of experience in international health and environmental issues. He was an advisor to the Global Programme on AIDS of the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the United Nations Development Programme. His writings have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, Ecosystem Health, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones and many other publications. He shared a National Magazine Award with Barbara Ehrenreich and Mark Dowie for a piece in Mother Jones in 1979 about the dumping of unsafe drugs in poor countries. He was the Distinguished Visiting Professional at the University of Iowa’s Center for International and Comparative Studies, a Fulbright Scholar to India and a founder of the Center for Natural Resource Studies in Bangladesh. He has been a witness on global health issue before the Congress, the Food and Drug Administration and in Federal Court.