Word: hysterias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...public anxiety, even hysteria, touched off by AIDS is understandable, if lamentable. The disease was identified just over four years ago, and much about the ways in which it spreads remains obscure. No one knows, for example, why it strikes women and men in about equal numbers in Central Africa, where the disease appears to have originated, while in the U.S. only about 7% of the 13,000 victims identified so far have been women. There are theories but no proof. Nonetheless, a review of the facts establishes that public fears are vastly overblown. The ways in which AIDS...
Even so, the known facts, while hardly comforting, provide no basis for hysteria. AIDS is not wildly contagious: a large portion, possibly even a majority, of the people who have been exposed to the disease will never get it. At highest risk are the most sexually active homosexual men. For people who do not come into close sexual contact with them, Stephen Schultz, assistant commissioner of the New York City health department, offers this moderately comforting summation: "AIDS is not an easy disease to come by. It is hard...
Anxiety over AIDS in some parts of the U.S. is verging on hysteria. The boycott that kept home 12,000 of the 47,000 students in two Queens school districts on the first day of school last week was only the most dramatic display of the panic that has made virtual lepers out of many AIDS victims...
...This isn't mass hysteria, it's frightened, unified parents," says Annette Maiorana, a Queens mother who kept her eight-year-old out of school last week. "In school, kids share their milk, they share sandwiches, they spit at each other. There's urine on the toilet seats. They chew on a pencil and give it to a friend. I have a little one ready to go to preschool, and it's frightening...
concern begins to verge on hysteria...