Over the course of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, black Americans have become a central target of US public health prevention efforts. And today, HIV/AIDS is understood to disproportionally affect black Americans. This markedly contrasts with knowledge about the disease and efforts to prevent it in the first decade of the epidemic in the US, when expert and lay understandings and responses centred on white gay males. This article demonstrates that explaining these historical reversals as purely reflective of epidemiological data - or best knowledge available - is insufficient. Drawing on the concept disease regimes and utilising a discursive analysis of epidemiological results and editorial commentary published from 1981 to 1994 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR), this article argues for a socio-political explanation for the changing colour of HIV/AIDS. That is, it scrutinises institutional and discursive practices that within the HIV/AIDS prevention field and disease discourse constituted a 'regime of black American exclusion' (1981-1992) and a 'regime of black American inclusion (1993-present day).
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 18. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 05 June 2026.
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Outputs from Sociology of Health & Illness
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Outputs of similar age from Sociology of Health & Illness
#12
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Altmetric has tracked 34,664,015 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 92nd percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,363 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 11.8. This one has done well, scoring higher than 86% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 349,436 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 89% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 41 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 70% of its contemporaries.
