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The story of an innovative program of treatment for AIDS in Africa that succeeded in the face of international development agencies'“afro pessimism”Until this century, Western governments and foundations framing policies for AIDS relief in Africa maintained that prevention alone was a preferable alternative to prevention-plus-treatment, which would be costly and impractical in Africa, or would benefit only the prosperous and well-connected.Sant'Egidio's Dream argues that this initial, failed approach to AIDS in African countries reflects a global moral blindness to the imperative to save lives–which was not lost on the Community of Sant'Egidio, an Italian, Catholic social movement rooted in “the gospel and friendship” and present in 70 countries. Drawing on two decades of peacemaking and humanitarian experience in Africa, the movement grasped the evidence that HIV, if treated, does not lead to AIDS and to death–and saw that treatment gives hope in Africa just as it does in the developed world. By enabling large numbers of people to live with a chronic disease, and involving family and neighbors in free and effective care, it offers a dream of a society surviving and even thriving in spite of HIV. In 2002, Sant Egidio established the DREAM (Drug Resource Enhancement Against AIDS and Malnutrition) project, a community-based approach to the AIDS crisis, rooted in medicine, epidemiology, and public health, that has proven effective in ten countries where it has been implemented–and has emerged as a model for healthcare in the global South.

Viral Frictions takes the reader along a trail of intersecting narratives to uncover how and why it is that HIV-related stigma persists in the age of treatment. Pfeiffer convincingly argues that stigma is a socially constructed process co-produced at the nexus of local, national, and global relationships and storytelling about and practices associated with HIV. Based on a decade of fieldwork in one highway trading center in Kenya, Viral Frictions offers compelling stories of stigma and discrimination as a lens for understanding broader social processes, the complexities of globalization and health, and their profound impact on the everyday social lives and relationships of people living through the ongoing HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. This highly engaging book is ideal reading for those interested in teaching and learning about intersectionality, as Pfeiffer meticulously demonstrates how HIV stigma interacts with issues of treatment, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, social change, and international aid systems.