ABSTRACT
Epidemics, and the social ways in which people respond to them, provide a window on the nature of human societies. The Black Death, the name given to the devastating epidemic of the bubonic plague that killed as much as one-third of the total population of Europe between the years 1346–1350, led to the persecution of Jewish people who were blamed for spreading the disease by their Christian neighbors. The Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic is no different. It is evident that the AIDS epidemic, with its jarring mix of painful and inspiring personal stories of human suffering and resistive will, combined with a deadening and persistent cascade of faceless statistics, provides a significant challenge to public health systems, to community health workers, and to the health social sciences. There can be no accurate analysis of AIDS in the absence of a consideration of the role of political economy.
