ABSTRACT
Wholesale sex tourism, occurring since the 1970s from the industrialized West to Third World countries such as Thailand and the Philippines, has only in recent years become an important vehicle for the spread of AIDS. In Thailand the idea that AIDS was a farang or Westerners’ disease to which Asians were genetically immune prevailed until the late 1980s (The Nation, 11 November 1987). Statistics seemed to support this belief. Infection was indeed noted in Thailand, but on a small scale and mainly among long-term foreign residents, in the homosexual circuit, and among hard drug users (see also Kammer et al., in this volume).1
