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Helen Epstein is an independent consultant and writer specializing in public health in developing countries. She has conducted research on reproductive health and AIDS in Africa for such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council and Human Rights Watch, and her articles have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Granta Magazine and many other publications. Her research interests include the right to health care in developing countries and the relationship between poverty and health in industrialized countries.
In 1984 Epstein received her BA in Physics from the University of California Berkeley, in 1991 she obtained a PhD in molecular biology from Cambridge University, and in 1996 she earned her MSc in Public Health in Developing Countries from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1993 Epstein moved to Uganda in search of an AIDS vaccine. There she taught molecular biology in the medical school at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, until 1994.
Although Epstein's efforts to find a vaccine failed, she was able to witness firsthand the suffering caused by HIV, which became the subject of her book The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing The Fight Against AIDS in Africa. This autobiographical account discusses 15 years of observing both the epidemic and the reactions to it of Western scientists, humanitarian agencies, and the communities most affected by AIDS deaths. Epstein discusses how the countries that are hardest hit by HIV are not those whose citizens are “promiscuousâ€, but those where it is common for people to have “long term concurrent†sexual relationships where an individual might have more than one long-term partner at one time, with those partners overlapping for months or years.
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