Stigma- The other Pandemic

Abstract

The stigma of a disease is a type of social stigma, a strong negative feeling towards a person with a particular illness relating to their moral status in society. Infectious diseases and even some non-communicable diseases have been stigmatized throughout history. The disease stigma has an astonishingly long history, one that traverses back to the medieval period’s panic over leprosy. The two other good examples of disease stigma are the 1892 outbreaks of typhus fever and cholera in the United States. While it was essential to take infectious disease control seriously, the measures adopted for disease control stigmatized an entire group of immigrants rather than pursuing control measures based on sound scientific principles. However, the most prominent disease stigma in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has probably been the prejudice against people with HIV/AIDS