From young women queuing for a test outside a village clinic, to NGO offices with no lightbulbs, from Presidents in denial, to missionaries waving banners for abstinence to the author confronting the possibility of testing positive herself, The Invisible Cure is eye-opening, provocative and utterly gripping in equal measure. AIDS may be the deadliest infectious disease in human history. What makes some societies more vulnerable than others? Why is the HIV epidemic so severe in Africa and why have many governments and NGOs largely failed to halt its progress? In an utterly riveting narrative where the author moves from ideas of how societies are arranged to the bitter conflict between nature and science, Helen Epstein goes to the heart of why epidemics spread in the way they do and what we should be doing to stop them.