In Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story, we find numerous examples which demonstrate the "AIDS stigma." In brief, this stigma is manifested in any situation which creates undue fear or denial of facts with respect to AIDS or AIDS patients. This would include self-stigmatization on the part of such patients. The stigma is based in part in reality and in part in myth and misperception. It is true that there is no known cure for AIDS, so that it is at present a progressive and fatal disease. Clearly, anyone who has the disease is seen by others as a carrier of a disease which is contagious and fatal. The myth enters the picture through irrational fear of the possibilities of contagion.
In Verghese's book specifically, we find the AIDS stigma raising its head when the first AIDS case comes to Johnson City, Tennessee: "Word spread like wildfire through the hospital. All those involved in his care in the ER and ICU agonized over their exposure." Not only were those who came into contact with the patient's blood terrified, so were those who touched only his skin, and even those "who had not touched the young man---the pharmacist, the orderlies, the transport personnel---were alarmed (Verghese 10).
This is the root of fear at the heart of the AIDS stigma---that the disease is transmissible through merely being in the presence of an AIDS patient---through the air, through saliva, through touch.
With respect to the AIDS patient himself, the author gives us an image which encapsulates the AIDS stigma: "The hometown boy was now regarded as an alien" (Verghese 11).
Misinformation feeds the AIDS stigma. Because irrational fear of AIDS, of death, and of the link with homosexuality as well, this society and its news media responded with a peculiar blend of escalating panic and denial. A newspaper misinterprets data given by the author and reports that there were up to a million AIDS cases in the country, when in fa...