The Zombie Curse: A Doctor's 25-Year Journey into the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic in Haiti

Fournier sends out a cry from the front lines about the overwhelming role poverty plays in the spread of AIDS. His awakening came in the early 1980s when, as a faculty physician at the University of Miami Medical School, he saw AIDS spreading through the city's Haitian population. He tells stories of patients—men, women and children—with clear signs of AIDS (believed at that time to be a disease of gay men and drug users) and how they were stigmatized by medical personnel. Among others, Fournier gives a moving account of Regis, a Haitian dentist who, may have contacted the virus through his work in medically primitive conditions. The author became completely committed to understanding this illness, and with supportive colleagues he traveled many times to Haiti and founded Project Medishare, devoted to improving Haiti's health-care system. He was especially successful in the town of Thomonde, establishing an initiative to train physicians and nurses. Fournier offers brutal descriptions of the poverty that fuels AIDS in Haiti, a country where malnutrition reigns, young women are forced into prostitution and orphanages abound. B&w photos. (Apr.)