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How To Survive A Plague: The Story Of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS

Author: David France

Random House , London, 2016, pp. 640

Well reviewed inside account of the succesfull battle to halt the AIDS epidemic, this is the incredible story of grassroots activists whose work turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a mangeable disease. France gives account of bureaucratic incompetence and political cowardice in a country where in 1982, 42.6 percent of gay men in San Francisco and 26.8 gay men in New York were infected by AIDS. Almost universally ignored, these men and women learned to become their own researchres, lobbysts, and drug smugglers; established their own newspapaers and research journals, and went on to force reform in the nation's disease fighting agencies.