The project seeks to uncover why the public health response to the AIDS epidemic has been so various across different industrialized nations (the US, Germany, France, Sweden, Britain), even though one might expect, in the age of scientific globalization, to find broad convergence. Despite the common assumption that the response has been largely similar in each western nation, in fact the spectrum of strategies has been wide. Continuing on previous work that details the reasons (historical, ideological, institutional, geographic) for divergence in national public health responses to past epidemics, this project seeks to set the approach to the AIDS epidemic in a broader historical community. It will analyze the various constellations of factors that determined the response in each nation, including ones like local political traditions, the social composition (ethnic and class) of each polity, the mutual interactions and inflections of other policies (against drug abuse for example) with public health measures, the nature of the state imposing and administering the preventive response, the nature of the social policy infrastructure in each country, and the power, organization and political prowess of the various interest groups most directly affected by the epidemic, above all gays. The method employed will be one of comparative political and policy analysis of the specific measures and legislation adopted in the period 1985-99 on the basis of the particular social, economic, interest group specifics of each country.
