Sex, blood, and death have been the stuff of myth and superstition for thousands of years. Is it any wonder, then, that a lethal disease as little understood as AIDS should be the stuff of twentieth- century mythmaking? AIDS came to light only 14 years ago as a strange disease in gay men. Within a year it had become clear that the illness was being transmitted not only through sex but through blood as well. Today AIDS is the leading cause of death in young American men. In parts of sub- Saharan Africa, it kills both men and women in shocking numbers--it causes 80 percent of young adult deaths in southwest Uganda, for example. Meanwhile the responsible retrovirus, HIV, continues to spread ruthlessly through South America and Asia. A tragedy on this scale is almost bound to attract explanations that ascribe blame to others while betraying the obsessions of their purveyors.
As Susan Sontag pointed out in her perceptive essay AIDS and Its Metaphors, this disease has become the scourge of our day. AIDS has supplanted cancer as the unclean disease, the one associated with guilt, anger, helplessness, and hopelessness. Since AIDS has an average incubation period of about nine years, the stigmatization of the disease affects even the "future ill": quite healthy HIV-positive people are denied life insurance and shunned as harbingers of death, or infectious lepers in our midst. Unlike cancer patients of a generation ago, however, people with AIDS have taken an active part in affirming their rights, seeking information, and promoting the search for a cure. While some of these advocacy groups work with doctors and scientists, others view the "AIDS establishment" with deep mistrust, accusing researchers of making their career in AIDS solely because it's a source of money and kudos.
All this is fertile ground for the creation of myths. They fall into two main categories, myths of blame and myths of denial. Some people, for example, desperately want to find a scapegoat for AIDS, someone to hold responsible for unleashing this new, unstoppable plague. Hence the allure of the notion that science played a role in its origin, whether by design or by a disastrous and subsequently covered-up mistake. One conspiracy theory has it that HIV is man-made, a hybrid engineered from two other retroviruses, the human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV) and the maedi-visna virus of sheep. Scientifically, we've known this is nonsense ever since the genes of HIV were sequenced in 1985. None of the genetic sequences of HIV match those of HTLV or the sheep virus. But the theory survives by dint of arguing that HIV is so genetically variable that it could quickly have evolved away from its parent viruses.
