Misdiagnosed: Blood, Race and the Missing History of AIDS Paperback – March 5, 2026

When AIDS surfaced, its destructive violence seemed to come out of nowhere like a sudden volcanic eruption or a devastating earthquake. But as is the case with powerful geological events, the epidemiological equivalent of the movement of tectonic plates had been rumbling below the surface long before AIDS exploded. These rumblings are the missing history of AIDS – the social, political, intellectual and technological events that transformed an unrecognized rare disease into the greatest pandemic of the twentieth century.Blood, Race and the Missing History of AIDS presents a radical new perspective on the origins, timeline and history of AIDS. The book is based on decades of research and is unlike any other treatment of the subject. It uncovers convincing evidence that AIDS is an old disease and that a deadly form of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a leading killer of gay men in the 1980s, was present in Central Europe in the 1860s and 70s at a time when an impressive struggle for gay rights was underway. While this was happening, hypodermic syringes for injecting opiates and contaminated smallpox vaccines were spreading hepatitis B throughout Europe. A century later, hepatitis B among IV drug users and gay men became the harbinger of AIDS. This theme of hepatitis is picked up during the Second World War when revolutionary developments in blood technology opened a whole new realm of possibilities for spreading HIV infections around the world. Breaking new ground, the book links criminal enterprises, the Vietnam War, and the heroin epidemic of the1970s to the tragic history of the widespread exposure of gay men to the devastation of AIDS. Read more