"Across Africa, HIV/AIDS is slowly killing millions of people in the prime of their lives, weakening state-structures, deepening poverty and reversing the gains in life expectancy achieved over the past century. Although many who study the dynamics of Africa's AIDS crisis accept that, to some degree, its entrenchment is a socially produced phenomenon, few have examined the contributions of the continent's ubiquitous poverty, the impact of the pervasive Structural Adjustment Programmes or Africa's marginalization in the process of globalization, on the course and intensity of the epidemic - until now."--BOOK JACKET.