ABSTRACT
I know that I have AIDS. I know what this means for me. I try not to have any illusions about it. Only I don’t know what other people mean when they say that I have ‘AIDS’. Most of the time they mean, ‘you are going to die’ (but who isn’t?). Other times, the more prejudiced say, ‘you are already dead’ (my daily experience refutes that). Sometimes they sum it up by saying, ‘you’ve lost your resistance’ (not yet! Not yet… I indignantly resist). In the end, what AIDS is this? The concept of AIDS was constructed in the last decade, in a worldwide political and ideological battle. The source of the problem lies in the medical definition of what is called, incorrectly, the AIDS epidemic. In fact, the epidemic was caused by several retroviruses called HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), which were transmitted either sexually, through the blood, or vertically (from mother to foetus or baby). Meanwhile, world consciousness adopted the acronym AIDS (or SIDA) as a fact based on, and transcending, technical and medical definitions. Many different meanings nebulously criss-crossed in the dance of words that sought to define the new disease-or if not really new, at least new to contemporary minds and certainly a novelty as a worldwide epidemic.
