Recent media attention on 80 year-old AIDS activist Dr. Gao Yaojie caught my attention. Dr. Gao gained fame for helping expose the tainted blood-selling operations that spread H.I.V. in central China in the 1990s. It seems her planned travel to the U.S. was being met with some official Chinese concerns. This is odd given the praises the government has been receiving of late for its bold efforts in the fight against AIDS.
Following on the heels of that story was one on the struggles in the workplace for those in China with Hepatitis B. The worker was reportedly told by his human resource manager, “you’re a hepatitis B carrier. You’re not fit for collective life, for working in a factory with colleagues.” The underlying meaning of the boss’s message was clear: we are afraid of you.
For those who have been in health care for awhile (U.S. or China), these are familiar if not disturbing stories. I have heard my share of them. They also prompted my recollection of some observations I wrote years ago on AIDS and surveillance. So I offer these to you as a kind of historical testimony to the misery epidemics continue to inflict on human relations.
“In Daniel Defoe’s classic fictional account of the bubonic plague in 17th century England, we are confronted, as Richard Goldstein observes, with “the plot” that we still impose on epidemics, a language of speaking plague that in some sense is foundational to the modern framing of our new experience with AIDS. We read in his imaginary journal of the collective denial of the plague’s death reality, of the alert paranoia over this inexplicable and invisible enemy, of the physical and emotional suffering endured, of the surrender by many to feelings of terror, of the dissolution and resurrection of community, and of the stark and often absurd character of public measures to contain the epidemic. The great visitation of 1665, once narrative and fictive, resonates as true; what was strange is now familiar. It is as if our AIDS experience, in humbling modern arrogance over 20th century technological superiority, has lessened somehow the historical difference between now and then.
“What is familiar in this reading is the continuous fear, expressed by both the sick and healthy alike, of being watched. Official examiners, watchmen, searchers, not to mention the inquiries of neighbors and friends, were all to be viewed with extreme suspicion during times of plague. Any sign of possible infection, real or imaginary, made one vulnerable to a number of devastating official impositions. . .
“Measures taken, embedded as they were in the rhetoric of public good, often led to the experiencing of private horror, and the physical suffering of plague victims became inseparable from the fears and effects of public exposure, inspection, judgement, rejection, and confinement or exile. To be watched was the first encounter with this dread, one to be avoided at all costs if possible, and if not, one in which all resources had to be brought to render it harmless.”
A.J. Fortin “AIDS, Surveillance and Public Policy”, Research in Law and Policy Studies (JAI Press Inc. 1995) vol. 4, pp.173-197)
