Will to Live tells how Brazil, against all odds, became the first developing country to universalize access to life-saving AIDS therapies--a breakthrough made possible by an unexpected alliance of activists, government reformers, development agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry. But anthropologist João Biehl also tells why this policy, hailed as a model worldwide, has been so difficult to implement among poor Brazilians with HIV/AIDS, who are often stigmatized as noncompliant or untreatable, becoming invisible to the public. More broadly, Biehl examines the political economy of pharmaceuticals that lies behind large-scale treatment rollouts, revealing the possibilities and inequalities that come with a magic bullet approach to health care.

In this revealing book Timothy Frasca uncovers the enormous cultural changes which have taken place throughout Latin America as a result of the disease. He brings issues such as sexuality, class, and religious beliefs into the open for the first time. Compelling interviews with activists, people with AIDS, government leaders, and church leaders-all show how the epidemic has developed. Frasca draws lessons from Latin America and the strong activist involvement that succeeded in increasing government resources to fight the disease.

Most studies on reproductive rights make women their focus, but in Fixing Men, Matthew Gutmann illuminates what men in the Mexican state of Oaxaca say and do about contraception, sex, and AIDS. Based on extensive fieldwork, this breakthrough study by a preeminent anthropologist of men and masculinities reveals how these men and the women in their lives make decisions about birth control, how they cope with the plague of AIDS, and the contradictory healing techniques biomedical and indigenous medical practitioners employ for infertility, impotence, and infidelity.

Cuba is the only country in the world that quarantines people who test positive for the HIV virus. In this book, Marvin Leiner analyzes the practice of quarantine in the context of the Cuban Revolution, which has otherwise brought significant advances in social programs, such as free universal education and comprehensive health care for all. He also focuses on efforts by Cuban educators to introduce sex education in the schools and to change sexist and homophobic attitudes, discussing their successes and failures with candor and examining the explicit and implicit linkages between machismo and homophobia.

Of the more than 40 million people around the world currently living with HIV/AIDS, two million live in Latin America and the Caribbean. In an engaging chronicle illuminated by his travels in the region, Shawn Smallman shows how the varying histories and cultures of the nations of Latin America have influenced the course of the pandemic.

Challenging traditional approaches to medical history, Disease in the History of Modern Latin America advances understandings of disease as a social and cultural construction in Latin America. Includes chapter "Nation, Science, and Sex: AIDS and the New Brazilian Sexuality" by Marvin Leiner.

Ecologies and Politics of Health brings together contributions from the natural and social sciences to examine three key themes: the ecological dimensions of health and vulnerability, the socio-political dimensions of human health, and the intersections between the ecological and social dimensions of health. Includes chapter, "Geographies of HIV and marginalization: a case study of HIV/AIDS risk among Mayan communities in western Belize" by Cynthia Pope.