1981–1982: (The AIDS Linkage: GRID Becomes AIDS, South Florida Physicians Notice Heterosexual Haitian Cases, Voodoo Rituals Invoked as Transmission Theory, a…

1981–1982: (The AIDS Linkage: GRID Becomes AIDS, South Florida Physicians Notice Heterosexual Haitian Cases, Voodoo Rituals Invoked as Transmission Theory, and the Story That Would Do More Damage to Haiti’s Economy Than Scandals, Human Rights, and Boat People Combined): Slowly, like a cloud on the horizon looming ever larger, a story had been building that would do more damage to Haiti’s economy than scandals, human rights violations, and boat people combined. In the spring of 1981, a few newspapers carried short accounts of a new illness that seemed to hit gay men with particular virulence — dubbed GRID, or Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome, the virus within a year had a new name and a much longer list of victims. Retitled AIDS after gay men were proven not to be the only affected group, the disease was invariably fatal and its etiology mysterious; tainted blood was thought to be the culprit, but questions abounded. An American population already panicked by Time cover stories on herpes was terrified by this new disease so many magnitudes worse. In such a climate, any observation, no matter how small a population it was based on or however faulty the science, was granted widespread publicity — thus when physicians in South Florida noticed that a good number of heterosexual AIDS cases involved Haitian immigrants, the Haiti-AIDS linkage was born. The questions that swirled — Vodou rituals that might allow blood transmission, investigations made difficult by language barriers and Haitian suspicions of anything governmental, whether these people were really gay having picked up the disease from visiting New Yorkers or had given it to gay Manhattan men on holiday, whether the disease spread through ritualistic scarring — became a calamity for Haiti whose consequences the regime could neither have foreseen nor, once the linkage was established in the public mind, could undo.