The AIDS Epidemic

In light of the history of sexually transmitted diseases in the last century, it is almost impossible to watch the AIDS epidemic without a sense of déjà vu . AIDS raises a host of concerns traditional to the debates about venereal infection-from morality to medicine, sexuality and deviance, and prevention and intervention. In many instances the situation with AIDS is similar to that of syphilis in the early twentieth century, described in the previous chapter by Elizabeth Fee. Like syphilis then, AIDS can cause death; there is currently no curative treatment; it is being addressed in the meantime via education and social engineer-

ing; and it arouses fears that reveal deeper social and cultural anxieties about the disease, its transmissibility, and its victims. Yet AIDS is different, too.

AIDS threatens our sense of medical security. After all, the age of transmissible, lethal infections was deemed long past in the Western world. Ours was the age of chronic disease—heart diseases and cancers that principally strike late in life; epidemics of infectious diseases had receded in the public memory. Not since the polio epidemics of the early 1950s has fear of infection reached such a high pitch as it has in the 1980s. Indeed, no epidemic since the swine flu pandemic of 1918 has had such a dramatic impact on patterns of mortality, and, ironically, the concerns in 1976 about a new epidemic of swine flu, which never materialized, seemed to confirm that fear of epidemic infection was unfounded in this modern age of antibiotics. AIDS has fractured this false sense of confidence. Effective responses to such a problem are further complicated by its "social construction," those attitudes and values that shape the public view of the disease. The social construction of AIDS will in turn have a powerful impact on the choices made in responding to the disease.