ABSTRACT
There are many, often intersecting, forms of population movement which make an individual’s chances of contracting HIV unpredictable, even if such movement produces sectors of greater or lesser denity on epidemiological maps. It is an accident of history and of the geopolitics of global movement that HIV ‘starts’ somewhere and ‘goes’ someplace else. But with the exception of the export of infected blood products from developed to developing countries, HIV has achieved its geographic mobility in the bodies of infected people. Nevertheless, the heterogeneity which contemporary mobility creates allowed the media and governments to revert to sheer xenophobia in their quest to confine HIV to particular national borders, or rather, to keep it from slipping in. Too much energy has gone into blaming individuals and countries, or trying to discover the ‘original’ locale of HIV. From the identification of the first ‘non-national’ cases of AIDS within European and US borders (respectively Zaireans in Belgium and US Haitians in Miami and New York City), global epidemiology and international relations, as research and policy enterprises, vied for control over AIDS policy.
