How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It | Tinderbox

Author Craig Timberg, Daniel Halperin, PhD,

With this groundbreaking narrative, longtime Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg and award-winning AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin tell the surprising story of methods Western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and after that fanned its rise. Applying remarkable new science, Tinderbox overturns the traditional wisdom around the origins with this deadly pandemic as well as the guidelines on how to fight it today.


Recent genetic studies have traced the birth of HIV for the forbidding equatorial forests of Cameroon, where chimpanzees carried herpes for millennia without resulting in a major outbreak in humans. Through the Scramble for Africa, colonial companies blazed new routes with the jungle seeking rubber and other riches, sending African porters into remote regions rarely traveled before. It had been here that humans first contracted the stress of HIV that might eventually cause 99 percent of AIDS deaths around the world.

Western powers were key actors in turning a localized outbreak in a sprawling epidemic as bustling new trade routes, modern colonial cities, along with the rise of prostitution sped the herpes virus across Africa. Christian missionaries campaigned to suppress polygamy, but left in its place fractured sexual cultures that proved uncommonly vulnerable to HIV. Equally devastating was the gradual loss of the African ritual of male circumcision, which recent surveys show offers significant protection against infection.

Timberg and Halperin believe that the same Western hubris that marked the colonial era has hamstrung the time and effort to combat HIV. In the Un AIDS program to the Bush administration's historic relief campaign, global dieticians have favored well-meaning Western approaches--abstinence campaigns, condom promotion, HIV testing--that have proven ineffective in slowing the epidemic in Africa. Meanwhile they've overlooked homegrown African initiatives aimed squarely with the behaviors spreading the herpes virus.

Inside a riveting narrative that stretches from colonial Leopoldville to 1980s Bay area to Nigeria today, Tinderbox reveals how human hands unleashed this epidemic and may now overcome it, only if we educate yourself on the lessons of the past.

Customer Reviews
For a long time, Daniel Halperin would be a thorn within the side from the global Helps relief community, demeaning the usual understanding and business as always. Like a medical anthropologist he'd an outsider status that permitted him to determine stuff that weren't working (like South Africa's multi-million-dollar LoveLife publicity blitz) and stuff that perform if public health insurance and academia would drive them seriously (like male circumcision). Building on Halperin's work and the own journalism in Africa, Craig Timberg has fashioned a taut narrative of unintentional effects stretching to the colonial days. It is a effective story, and also the authors never let's forget its human cost.

Timberg and Halperin know their subject material thoroughly with assembled an immensely readable book that covers plenty of ground. I've worked in the field for many years but nonetheless many userful stuff here from Tinderbox - the authors are specially good about the origins of AIDS. I do not go along with almost all their arguments, but I appreciate just how much research and legwork installed into backing them up. Must-read in the event you work in AIDS, in Africa, in global health.