Resources for Understanding: HIV & AIDS

This resource guide provides a range of resources on the history of HIV and AIDS, as well as current research and support.

Fact Sheets & Infographics

California History & Organizations

Cares Foundation: Sacramento Branch

The CARES Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides grants to agencies in California’s Sacramento region that serve the needs of people living with HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), prevent the transmission of HIV, and/or raise social awareness to end discrimination and stigma against those living with or at risk of contracting HIV. These grants may include funds for general support or for specific programs.

Pacific AETC – AIDS Education & Training Center

Pacific AETC – Central Valley & Northern Interior provides clinical training and capacity building assistance to providers of high-volume urban HIV clinics as well as low volume, rural community health centers throughout central and eastern Northern California. The training center offers an array of HIV/AIDS training and educational activities, including didactic seminars, workshops, conferences, preceptorships, on-site clinical mentoring, clinical consultations, and telehealth programs. Many programs are targeted towards healthcare professionals providing care to underserved populations in community health clinics, rural community health centers, and correctional facilities.

UCSF AIDS Research Institute

“UCSF receives more NIH funding for HIV/AIDS research than any other public institution in the country, making it one of the largest AIDS research entities in the world. Listed below are the labs, research centers, and trial groups that are engaged in some of the most innovative and exciting HIV research today.” More information about their current research and the history of HIV/AIDS is available on their website.

CDPH AIDS Office: California Department of Public Health AIDS Office.

“The AIDS Office works collaboratively with state and federal agencies, local health jurisdictions, universities, and community-based organizations to ensure that efforts to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic are targeted and effective.”

Graphic Novels

Taking turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS care Unit 371 by M.K. Czerwiec 2021

Author M.K. Czerwiec recounts her experience working as a nurse in a HIV/AIDS care unit in the 1990s. “Drawn in a restrained, inviting style, Taking Turns is an open, honest look at suffering, grief, and resilience among a community of medical professionals and patients at the heart of the AIDS epidemic.” EBook available online.

Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned by: Judd Winick, 2000

“In this memoir in graphic novel form, the author relates his friendship with an HIV-positive AIDS activist while they were roommates during the filming of the MTV show ‘Real World: San Francisco.’”

Memoirs

In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic by Marie Howe and Michael Klein, 1995

Collection of essays, memoirs, letters, diary entries. Available at Shields Library for checkout.

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors by Susan Sontag, 1990

Combined volume of Sontag’s memoir Illness as Metaphor, written as she recovered from cancer, and her sequel written to “counter the almost universal labeling of AIDS as a ‘plague.’” Available at Shields Library for checkout.

My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese, 1995

“A young doctor of eastern Tennessee describes the town’s first introduction to the AIDS virus, which preceded a disturbing epidemic and introduced the doctor to many unique people.” Available for checkout at Mabie Law Library.

The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer, 1986

Script of Kramer’s play, mostly autobiographical, and focused on HIV/AIDS in New York City from 1981 to 1984. Available at Shields Library for checkout.

Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles by Eric Wat, 2021

“Eric Wat’s moving community memoir of how the AIDS epidemic reshaped Asian American activism in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s.” EBook available online.

Other Books

Organized in chronological order from the 1980s to present day.

1987

AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and Other Manifestations of HIV Infection: Epidemiology, Etiology, Immunology, Clinical Manifestations, Pathology, Control, Treatment and Prevention by Wormser, Gary P.; Stahl, Rosalyn E.; Bottone, Edward J.

• This book offers the state of literature and research on HIV/AIDS during the 1980s.
• Available by interlibrary loan request only.

The Works: Drugs, Sex, and AIDS by Pappas, L., Prince, W., Dangle, L., Hack, R., & San Francisco AIDS Foundation, issuing body. (1987).

• This book is aimed at educating the public on ways of preventing HIV.
• Available for viewing in Shields Library Special Collections.

1990

AIDS, The Second Decade The National Research Council, by S., Miller, H. G., Turner, C. F., Moses, L. E. National Research Council, & Committee on AIDS Research and the Behavioral

• “AIDS: The Second Decade updates trends in AIDS cases and HIV infection among the homosexual community, intravenous drug users, women, minorities, and other groups; presents an overview of a wide range of behavioral intervention strategies directed at specific groups; discusses discrimination against people with AIDS and HIV infection; and presents available data on the proportion of teenagers engaging in the behaviors that can transmit the virus and on female prostitutes and HIV infection.”

1991

The AIDS Research Program of the National Institutes of Health: Report of a Study by Institute of Medicine. Committee to Study the AIDS Research Program of the National Institutes of Health., & Institute of Medicine

• This book, written at the request of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to assist its AIDS program office in planning future directions, contains a series of recommendations for ensuring that AIDS research is a well-organized, well-planned, and comprehensive long-range program leading to the control and eventual eradication of the disease.

2004

The AIDS Pandemic in the 21st Century by Census Bureau, U.S. Agency for International Development, Bureau of Global Health, Office of HIV/AIDS

• This report contains statistics on birth and death rates with HIV and without HIV in countries around the world. Projections for HIV rates in 2020 are included. From these statistics, a discussion on the prevalence and growth of HIV and AIDS is included.

2016

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France

• “The definitive history of the successful battle to halt the AIDS epidemic, and the powerful, heroic stories of the gay activists who refused to die without a fight.” Print book available at Shields Library.
• Documentary available through Kanopy online.

2017

HIV/AIDS in Rural Communities : Research, Education, and Advocacy by Parks, F. M., Felzien, G. S., & Jue, Sally. (Eds.)

• This volume reviews the experience and treatment of HIV/AIDS in rural America at the clinical, care system, community, and individual levels. Rural HIV-related phenomena are explored within healthcare contexts (physician shortages, treatment disparities) and the social environment (stigma, the opioid epidemic), and contrasted with urban frames of reference.
• EBook available online.

2019

HIV/AIDS: Immunochemistry, Reductionism and Vaccine Design: A Review of 20 Years of Research by MHV Van Regenmortel

• This book gathers a series of pivotal papers on the development of an HIV/AIDS vaccine published in the last two decades. Accompanied by extensive comments putting the material into an up-to-date context, all three parts of the book offer a broad overview of the numerous unsuccessful attempts made in recent years to develop a preventive HIV vaccine. Providing a detailed review and analysis of studies published from 1998 to the present day, it examines the likely reasons for the failure to develop an HIV vaccine despite multi-million dollar investments.
• EBook available online.

2023

HIV/AIDS Global Status by Berger, Stephen, author.; GIDEON science team.

• HIV/AIDS: Global Status is one in a series of GIDEON ebooks which summarize the status of individual infectious diseases, in every country of the world. Data are based on the GIDEON database (www.gideononline.com) which relies on standard text books, peer-review journals, Health Ministry reports and ProMED, supplemented by an ongoing exhaustive search of the medical literature.

Documentaries

All available to watch online through the library’s Kanopy license.

• How to survive a plague: The inside story of how citizens and science tamed AIDS (2012, 1hr 49min).
• The AIDS Show (1986, 57 min)
• Faces of AIDS (2016, 22 min)
• Voices From the Front: AIDS Activism (1991, 1hr 32min)
• Nothing Without Us: Women in the Global Fight Against AIDS (2017, 1hr 8min)
• Miss HIV: Overcoming AIDS in Africa (2007, 1hr 16min)
• Wilhemina’s War: Fighting HIV and AIDS in the South (2015, 53min)
• Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of Act Up (2002, 1hr 15min)