Helen Epstein

Biography


Helen Epstein, a molecular biologist by training, is an independent consultant and writer specializing in public health in developing countries. Her work has appeared in Discover, New Scientist, The New York Times Magazine, and she has written frequently on AIDS for the New York Review of Books. Her book on AIDS in Africa is forthcoming in 2006.

See Work

ESSAYS / Winter 2006

AIDS and Africa’s Hidden War

By Helen Epstein

One October evening in 2001, in an impoverished shantytown in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, David Potse entered the house of a former girlfriend, and raped her 9-month-old daughter. The child was later taken to a nearby...

ESSAYS / Winter 2006

The Underground Economy of AIDS

By Helen Epstein

In 2001, a group of scholars at University of California, San Francisco came up with a scheme that they hoped would protect African women from HIV. They had been working in Zimbabwe, a poor, politically troubled nation in Southern Africa...