ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, an apparently new disease, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, appeared in the United States and spread rapidly. The disease first became evident among male homosexuals and intravenous drug users, and in the United States it remains disproportionately concentrated in these two populations. HIV infection occurs when an infected person's blood or other body fluid enters another person's bloodstream. The most efficient mode of transmission is the entry of a large amount of infected blood into the bloodstream, as in a blood transfusion. The major premise of the sociological study of disease is that, even though all diseases are medical phenomena, they cannot be adequately understood in medical terms alone. Sociology consists of a number of specialties that focus on specific phenomena, such as deviant behavior and deviant subcultures, riots and other forms of collective disruption, interaction networks, or cross-cultural differences in social institutions.
