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Sammanfattning

The HIV epidemic is an often-used example of how individual patients and larger patient groups have been strong players in relation to, for example, government agencies, the pharmaceutical industry, policymakers and the media. At the same time there were significant differences between how different groups of patients was formed and what consequences it had. This article examines how different patient groups acted in the Swedish HIV epidemic in the 1980s and early 1990s. Four categories of patients are distinguished: "the activists", "the quiet", "the marginalized", and "the invisible". The analysis stresses that it is important to not only acknowledge patients as collective actors in epidemics, but also to investigate how different groups of patients act and influence how epidemics are understood and managed.

MeSH