How to Survive a Plague

Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2017Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2017 Since that stunning breakthrough in 1996, the new treatments had reached millions of people worldwide, returning to them the promise of a near-normal life-span. Some had been just breaths away from their own deaths… So dramatic was their resurrection that stupefied doctors began calling it the Lazarus effect. What once seemed an unbeatable plague has become a manageable condition and yet around the world millions of people still die from AIDS every year, without access to the unaffordable drug care that could save them. How to Survive a Plague by David France is the riveting, powerful and profoundly moving story of the AIDS epidemic and the grass-roots movement of activists, many of them facing their own life-or-death struggles, who grabbed the reins of scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease. Around the globe, the 15.8 million people taking anti-AIDS drugs today are alive thanks to their efforts. Not since the publication of Randy Shilts's now classic And the Band Played On in 1987 has a book sought to measure the AIDS plague in such brutally human, intimate, and soaring terms.  Weaving together the stories of dozens of individuals, this is an insider's account of a pivotal moment in our history and one that changed the way that medical science is practised worldwide.