Introduction

AIDS is a disease that continually challenges conventional approaches to understanding and preventing disease. From the start, AIDS appeared as an anomaly. First diagnosed in the United States, one of the richest nations on earth, AIDS was a new infectious ailment that contradicted all predictions of public health policy. At a time when biomedical institutions and the public health agenda were increasingly oriented to managing the chronic diseases of an aging population, AIDS felled young people—and especially young gay men. It raised the specter of a quickly spreading lethal disease, bringing to the fore fears of a plague like the epidemics of what had seemed the distant, and unrepeatable, past. Upsetting fundamental notions of “progress” as well as of propriety, AIDS thrust upon the public and public health professionals the uncomfortable awareness that current policies were inadequate to deal with this upstart disease.