People & Public Health: How Americans Created the HIV, COVID-19, and Other Modern-day Pandemics.

The Latest Book By Perry N. Halkitis, PhD, MS, MPH – Scheduled 2024-2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

Preview

I have been surrounded by the conditions of infectious disease for my entire personal and professional adult life beginning in 1981—43 of my 61 years. As my dear friend Mala Hoffman discussed in the Foreword, this work is in many ways a full circle moment for me.

My career as an infectious disease epidemiologist and public health psychologist has been defined to a great extent by two pandemics–the first being that of HIV, which wreaked havoc upon all parts of the world including the United States, particularly among sexual minority and racial and ethnic minority populations (6 of them my closest friends). More recently, it was the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed 20 million people to date (and left my brother Tony further immobilized with COVID-19 induced retinal artery occlusion). I had no intention of writing another book. However, when I saw the mistakes of the past that we experienced during the 1980s and 1990s repeat themselves again at the onset of 2020, I knew that we in public health, that we as human beings, had to change the way we think about and prevent infectious diseases. This is the only way to decrease the morbidity and mortality associated with pathogens that will evolve in the future.