Quarantine and the problem of AIDS

Abstract

Through history, quarantine has been a response not only to the mode of disease transmission, but also to popular demands for a boundary between the kind of people so diseased and the respectable people who hope to remain healthy. Efforts to control epidemics--leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, drug addiction--through quarantine of large numbers of people have never been successful. AIDS patients share characteristics often invoked in defense of quarantine; they do have reason to fear anachronistic and unenlightened outrage.