Book tinderbox7/8/2023 Agency for International Development in the tiny African kingdom of Swaziland. That concerns the role of Halperin, who met Timberg in 2005 when Halperin worked for the U.S. For those who know something about AIDS, the discoveries are few here - with perhaps one exception. Readers unfamiliar with the epidemic will find it valuable. The remainder is AIDS 101, focusing in particular on the past two decades. Timberg and Halperin devote just the first sixth of the book to their exploration of the roots of the epidemic. (The Obama administration has pledged to increase its Global Fund donation to $4 billion over three years activists are arguing for $6 billion.) And indeed, the fight against AIDS is particularly vulnerable now: Several European donors have cut their funding for the Global Fund in part because of the economic crisis, and the Global Fund has canceled new giving until 2014. The theory outlined in “Tinderbox” could support the case for Africa reparations, or at least for more generous giving to fight AIDS. ’Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It’ by Craig Timberg & David Halperin (Harper) “Colonialists had had the effect of transforming the region into a tinderbox capable of creating the AIDS epidemic,” the authors write. That worker spread the virus to others through sex. Genetic testing has traced the origins to the Kinshasa area, most likely arriving there in the blood of a worker in the bush-meat trade. Timberg, a Washington Post journalist, and Halperin, an epidemiologist and medical anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, write that researchers found a strain of the SIV virus among chimpanzees in the bush of the Congo River basin.The virus, which closely resembles a strain of the HIV-1 group M, the deadliest AIDS strain, traveled from chimps to humans through a cut or wound. And a hell of a lot more to boot.”Īs Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin suggest in their new book, “ Tinderbox,”there may be another reason that the West should do more to fight the AIDS epidemic: Colonialists’ aggressive trade practices may have opened new travel routes in central Africa that helped spread a disease from a dense forest to the world beyond. The modern world’s economy was built on Africa’s human and natural resources, and it depends on them to this day. In his remarkable speech, Lewis, co-director of AIDS-Free World, said the payback was for multiple reasons: “From slavery to today’s extractive industries of minerals and oil, Africa is financing the world. Africa, he noted, was giving the world thousands of health-care workers whom it had educated, saving the West billions of dollars annually. global AIDS initiative called PEPFAR and by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria amounted to “partial reparations” to the continent. However, readers preferring more political intrigue and great action in their romance will be willing to overlook that.Just a few months ago, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a leading firebrand of the global AIDS movement, Stephen Lewis, said at a conference that the money given to Africa by the U.S. The scenes between Morgan and Pax are fine, but don’t really help build the relationship and feel a bit episodic. Grant’s greatest strength is her ability to write gripping suspense with a wonderfully brisk pace, but the romance can be clunky. Together they discover that the fossils are just a piece of a bigger political puzzle and that the warlord involved is desperate to get his hands on Morgan. Fortunately she’s saved by Pax Blanchard, head of a Special Forces team stationed in Djibouti. What she doesn’t know is that someone has attached a bomb to her car, planning to detonate it once she’s in the secure compound of Camp Citron, the local military base. Morgan Adler, a paleoanthropologist, knows that her discovery of a Lucy-like fossilized human will significantly change what people know about the predecessors of the human species. Set in the turbulent country of Djibouti, the first entry in Grant’s Flashpoint series works better as suspense than romance.
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