EXCERPT
For those of us who lived through the early days of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, the current national panic over Ebola brings back some very bad memories. The toxic mix of scientific ignorance and paranoia on display in the reaction to the return of health care workers from the front lines of the fight against Ebola in West Africa, the amplification of these reactions by politicians and the media, and the fear-driven suspicion and shunning of whole classes of people are all reminiscent of the response to the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s.
The first decade of the AIDS epidemic spawned a similar kind of hysteria, predominantly targeted at people living with HIV–AIDS, but also directed against what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unfortunately called the four Hs, the four high-risk groups: homosexuals, heroin addicts, hemophiliacs, and Haitians. Various politicians called for quarantining of anyone who tested positive for HIV, and commentator William F. Buckley infamously penned an op-ed in the New York Times saying that “everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed.” There was an AIDS-quarantine ballot initiative in California, and various states threatened or passed conditional quarantine measures. Fortunately, such measures were used infrequently. Far more common then and now is the use of criminal law to target people who may have exposed their partners or others to HIV or transmitted the virus to them; between 2008 and 2013 alone, there were at least 180 such prosecutions.1
