AIDS, Drugs and Sexual Risk

Few diseases have highlighted the importance of the interatction between human behaviour, health and disease as AIDS has done. Today, ten years after the first cases of AIDS were reported, the need to characterize the complex interaction of factors that place individuals, families and communities at risk of HIV and AIDS has become imperative. In the absence of more precise information, it will continue to be difficult to address the special needs of individuals and communities with respect to prevention, care and treatment. Drug injectors sharing needles, it is widely thought, are the ones most likely to generate further spread of the virus to the wider non-drug injecting population through sexual intercourse. In this book the authors argue that such a fear is rooted in a profound ignorance of drug injectors. Drawing on their three years of research into the ethnography of drug injectors' behaviour they describe the culture that drug injectors share, and place their behaviour in relation to HIV within that culture. At the end of each chapter, they highlight the policy and service implications of their work.
In conclusion, they argue that discourse of risk behaviours, treatments and vacines glosses over the more fundamental social and poltiical problems which remain largely unaddressed.