Epidemics don’t just kill lots of people, they “take up a lot of space in the national budget” and affect relationships of “security and power,” said Adia Benton, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University who has done extensive field work in disease-plagued regions of Africa. Benton has authored a book, titled, “HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone.” Benton says donor countries, NGOs and ruling elites often focus on every political and economic aspect of deadly epidemics except “the failure of care.”