I think sometimes we think, well, only gay people can get it -"It's not going to happen to me." And here I am saying that it can happen to anybody, even me.-Earvin "Magic" Johnson, 1991 1
| INTRODUCTIONThe AIDS 2 pandemic was one of the largest public health crizes in the 20th century. While there is typically a large degree of informational asymmetries between health experts and at-risk populations which exacerbate similar contagions, the AIDS pandemic is in many ways defined by it. As the virus became increasingly prevalent throughout the world, scientific understanding of its origins, causes, and consequences rapidly increased, while the general public's understanding lagged. Though a substantial majority of Americans during the height of the AIDS pandemic understood how HIV could be contracted, there existed large gaps in knowledge regarding its transmission risks-particularly amongst heterosexuals (Herek & Capitanio, 1998;Herek et al., 2002Herek et al., , 2005. There were few (if any) shocks to these beliefs which were greater than when Earvin "Magic" Johnson publicly announced that he had contracted HIV on
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