Pakistani HIV knowledge rests on anecdote that stigmatizes migrant workers.

Evidence

Profile,” available online at http://www.unaids.org/en/CountryResponses/Coun tries/pakistan.asp (accessed December 1, 2009). S. A. Shah, O. A. Khan, S. Kristensen, and S. H. Vermund (1999) conducted a study in 1996–98 in Sindh Province that identified a total of seventy-nine cases; 61 percent to 86 percent of the reported cases were migrant workers. Despite the small size of this sample, it has become widely accepted that hiv was brought to Pakistan by migrant workers in the 1990s, where it reached epidemic proportions in specific locations mainly via intravenous drug users and, less so, via sex work and homosexual contact (see, e.g., Rai et al. 2007). Much of what is believed about hiv and aids in Pakistan is thus based on anecdotal evidence, and labor migrants in small towns are often stigmatized as spreading hiv. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 926

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s overall thesis about how the Pakistani migrant-labor diaspora gets blamed for conflated moral, disease, and political threats.