Disease stigma Quotes

I still cannot fathom how difficult it was for the women I met to find out that they were HIV-positive. It is such a courageous undertaking in countries where there is still considerable stigma about the disease. They got tested to ensure that their unborn babies would have a chance of life by being born free of the virus.

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

AIDS is a judgment we have brought upon ourselves.

AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

HIV AIDS is a disease with stigma. And we have learned with experience, not just with HIV AIDS but with other diseases, countries for many reasons are sometimes hesitant to admit they have a problem.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.

To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation.

Infectious disease exists at this intersection between real science, medicine, public health, social policy, and human conflict. There's a tendency of people to try and make a group out of those who have the disease. It makes people who don't have the disease feel safer.

When a man of normal habits is ill, everyone hastens to assure him that he is going to recover. When a vegetarian is ill (which fortunately very seldom happens), everyone assures him that he is going to die, and that they told him so, and that it serves him right. They implore him to take at least a little gravy, so as to give himself a chance of lasting out the night

AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh's charioteers. AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals. It is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.

You've got to watch the politics of AIDS. The politics of AIDS can work both for and against the victims of AIDS.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

ACT UP was trying to explain to Americans that AIDS could affect all of us: that health care that ended once your disease was expensive could affect more than gay men with HIV or AIDS. We were trying to tell them about the future - a future they didn't yet see and would be forced to accept if they failed to act.

The prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one.

“Healthy" and “diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.

Let's face it, fashion was destroyed by HIV. People would just die like flies in the eighties. Then, my brother died of HIV, so I was shaken by it in a way that you cannot imagine. It has sadly been in my life ever since and affected it for such a long time. It won't let go. To me, it's a fight that's not finished. Of course, there are medicines that help, but half the world has no access to them.

AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.

There are zillions of people who say that alcoholism is a disease, but not many of them believe it.

I did not want to become a poster child for yet another disease.

As for being AIDS infested, I don't know yet, I'm too scared to get tested.

Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.

As far as I am concerned, LGBT can only stand for leprosy, gonorrhea, bacteria, and tuberculosis, all of which are detrimental to human existence.

If you have a disease and suddenly start getting ads for cures for that disease and it's an embarrassing disease - all that kind of stuff it just gets into that zone of autonomy or privacy where you feel a sense of freedom to be who you want to be.