This text asks whatever happened to the plague that seemed so threatening in the early 1980s, resulting in highly visible public interventions such as the posters of the health promotions campaigns and mainstream films like "Philadelphia". The book argues that the explosion of HIV/AIDS into highly visible cultural forms, such as Hollywood movies, leaflet drops, theatre, activist interventions and art from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, has been followed by its renewed invisible status. Griffin suggests that changes in the understanding of HIV/AIDS, the shift from "dying of" to "living with" in Western cultures, and a failure to grasp the full extent of the growth and impact of HIV/AIDS in a number of African and Asian countries, has led to the "death" of the disease in the Western media. The "othering" of HIV/AIDS has made representation at the cultural and at the political level problematic, relegating the continued epidemic proportions to the backpage of the news media and ignoring or shrouding the havoc HIV/AIDS is still wreaking.