Legal and ethical issues relating to AIDS.

The worldwide AIDS epidemic has posed an extraordinary array of ethical and legal challenges. The work presented here reviews three issues at the heart of the matter: discrimination against HIV-infected people, the limits of confidentiality, and the exercise of coercive government powers to limit spread of the disease. Because the authors are most familiar with the U.S. experience, the review deals primarily with the history of the epidemic in the United States and public responses to it in that country.