Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.
Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene - in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses.
Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination-a moral disease, a social pathology...
Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.