Around the Bush Yet Again: Reflection on Reckless Vectors, Past and Present

Abstract

Disease is an analytic prism for cultural understanding. Entire mythologies build up, not only about a disease itself, but about the individuals bearing the disease. Social images, stereotypes, and official fictions come to be perpetuated by the media as the facts of the disease. . . . Diseases of no known cause or cure, especially, strike at the very depths of our fears. (Payne & Risch, 1984, p. 17)