Hidden in the Blood Book

Hidden in the Blood offers American readers a glimpse of the AIDS crisis on the Mexican front. Hidden in the Blood explores the daily lives of staff and patients at a clinic where three-quarters of HIV-positive people in the region are treated. Readers will come to know these patients, who come from a soberingly wide range of social and economic backgrounds - middle-aged fathers, married couples, transvestites, truck drivers, folklore dancers, a young woman infected by a blood transfusion during plastic surgery. In readable, lucid prose, Wilson recounts the heroic efforts of the clinic staff - doctors such as Alejandro Guerrero and Russell Rodriguez and nurses like Jose Manuel Polanco - as they struggle to treat their SIDA patients while coping with their lack of some of the latest diagnostic technology. Through the stories of these brave, caring staff members, readers will find evidence to dispel the common notion that Third-World medicine is a chamber of horrors. Wilson also explores the broad social context of AIDS in the Yucatan. Hidden in the Blood tells the stories of still-closeted homosexual men profoundly worried for their own survival and privacy, a conservative hematologist who mounted the first SIDA research effort in the peninsula, and the young men and women the crisis has moved to become activists.

Beyond some frightening statistics, few of us know much about AIDS outside the U.S. This book explores the daily life of staff and patients at a clinic in Mexico where three quarters of HIV-positive people in the region are treated. Wilson recounts the heroic efforts of the clinic staff as they struggle to treat the AIDS patients with only limited resources.