The concluding lecture takes the example of HIV/AIDS and discusses how reactions to the epidemic mirrored those found in the social and cultural perception of earlier epidemics. As in earlier epidemics, sufferers have been ostracized, persecuted or blamed for their own misfortune. In South Africa the government of Thabn Mbeki dismissed AIDS as an ideological construct of neo-colonialism building on racist stereotypes of Africans as sexually ...
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