Quarantine and the Problem of AIDS

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.

Author(s): David F. Musto

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Volume 64, Issue S1 (pages 97–117)
Published in 1986