Introduction: The U=U (i.e., undetectable equals untransmittable) campaign is founded upon biomedical advancements that have positioned HIV as a manageable condition with effectively zero risk of transmission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Opin HIV AIDS
March 2022
Purpose Of Review: This paper reviews recent studies examining the application of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-specific criminal laws in North America (particularly the United States and Canada). In the wake of the development of new biomedical prevention strategies, many states in the United States (US) have recently begun to reform or repeal their HIV-specific laws. These findings can help inform efforts to 'modernize' HIV laws (or, to revise in ways that reflect recent scientific advances in HIV treatment and prevention).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Public Health
November 2018
Despite not originating in Spain, the 1918 influenza pandemic is commonly known as the "Spanish flu"-a name that reflects a tendency in public health history to associate new infectious diseases with foreign nationals and foreign countries. Intentional or not, an effect of this naming convention is to communicate a causal relationship between foreign populations and the spread of infectious disease, potentially promoting irrational fear and stigma. I address two relevant issues to help contextualize these naming practices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA 2014 U.S. Department of Justice Best Practices Report advocates that states eliminate HIV-specific criminal penalties except under 2 conditions: when a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive person intentionally commits a sex crime or transmits the virus by engaging in behavior that poses a significant risk of transmission, regardless of actual transmission.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial scientists have much to contribute to the analysis of the real and potential contribution of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to HIV prevention around the world. Beyond just a matter of clinical efficacy and getting pills into people's mouths, PrEP raises a number of important social-psychological questions that must be attended to in order to translate biomedical and clinical findings into uptake of PrEP among enough people at risk of HIV infection to produce population-level effectiveness. PrEP is a dynamic phenomenon with "dialectical" attributes that invite both optimism and cynicism as a desirable and effective HIV prevention strategy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSociological approaches to the social control of sickness have tended to focus on medicalization or the process through which social phenomena come to be regulated by medicine. Much less is known about how social problems historically understood as medical come to be governed by the criminal law, or what I term the "criminalization of sickness." Thirty three US states have enacted criminal statutes that require all HIV-positive individuals to disclose their infection before engaging in a wide range of sexual practices.
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