Helen Epstein

Helen C. Epstein (born 1961) is an American professor of human rights and public health, with a special interest in Uganda and other East African nations. She has researched reproductive health and AIDS in Africa for organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Population Council, and Human Rights Watch. In 2003-2004, she won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. The next year, she was a visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Center for Health and Wellbeing.

Biography Epstein received her BA degree in 1984 (Physics, University of California-Berkeley), her Ph.D. in 1991 (Molecular Biology, Cambridge University), and her MSc in 1996 (Public Health in Developing Countries, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). While there, she taught molecular biology in the medical school at Makerere University in Kampala.

Although her efforts to find a vaccine failed, Epstein was able to witness firsthand the suffering caused by HIV, which became the subject of her 2007 book, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS (note: when it was reissued in paperback by Picador in 2008, the subtitle was changed to Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa). The book is an autobiographical account of her 15 years spent studying the AIDS epidemic and the reactions to it of Western scientists, humanitarian agencies, and the communities most affected by AIDS deaths. She argues that the African countries hardest hit by HIV are not those whose citizens are "promiscuous", but rather where it is common for people to have "long-term concurrent" sexual relationships, in which an individual might have more than one long-term partner at a time, and when some partners might overlap for months or years. She notes how this giant web of ongoing sexual relationships "creates ideal conditions for the spread of HIV; if one person in the network contracts HIV, everyone else is put at risk."

After The Invisible Cure, Epstein continued to research political, health and humanitarian issues in Uganda and elsewhere in East Africa. Her reporting from the continent was regularly featured in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. Her increasing focus on African politics led to her writing the 2017 book, Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror. In this work, she criticizes U.S. foreign policy for unconditionally backing Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, which she believes contributed to the region's political turmoil and widespread suffering.

Since 2010, Epstein has been Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health in the Global and International Studies Program at Bard College. In 2013-2014, she was an Open Society Fellow with Open Society Foundations.