Scrambling for Africa: Aids, Expertise, and the Rise of American Global Health Science

The discovery of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in 1995 was effectively a response to the high mortality of AIDS in the global North, where the high cost of industrial pharmaceutical development could be afforded, and where large numbers of researchers could be trained and recruited, even though such prosperity did not provide immunity to the problem of HIV. It was in the end only through international aid that the therapy, although nearly one decade late and only available to those striving for inclusion (Nguyen 2010), could be accessed by HIV-infected individuals in the global South. Africa, home to “thousands of never-before treated patients” (4), was subsequently transformed from a field “too poor and chaotic to benefit from the high-tech antiretroviral medications” (6) to a continent that “is in vogue now” (7). Not only have African patients started on...