The AIDS crisis is just beginning. Over the next five years we can expect to see the number of AIDS patients in the United States grow tenfold. Yet, already both our health care institutions and our social fabric are strained by the AIDS epidemic. Moreover, AIDS is no longer just the problem mainly of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a few other large cities. Nor is it any longer the problem only of homosexuals, drug addicts, and a few other "high-risk" groups. Indeed, AIDS is fast becoming everyone's problem. The AIDS epidemic is suffused with and exacerbate by myriad ethical, financial, legal, medical, political, psychosocial issues that demand balanced discussion and careful analysis. [This book] provides the most comprehensive examination to date of these issues and the challenges AIDS poses for our society. Its contributors confront the AIDS epidemic with reasoned, experience-backed considerations of its consequences and suggest how health care providers, policymakers, and society can manage them more effectively and more humanely.