ABSTRACT
A number of factors will influence the course of an epidemic, of which the bio-medical are not necessarily the most important. In the case of HIV, its spread was largely related to specific social and cultural patterns: the sexual networks of homosexual men, the availability of needles, the political and economic power relationships of prostitution, the nature of transport routes through areas of high prevalence. Just as the discovery of the virus was only possible because of pre-existing knowledge and assumptions about (retro) viruses, so too the ways in which it spread, and the responses to it, were very much products of particular ideological, political, and social formations, present in the last decades of the twentieth century.
