The limits of privacy: surveillance and the control of disease.

What justified the Center for Disease Control's 1999 determination to require HIV case reporting? Why were names necessary? Why did opponents view the reporting of names with such alarm? This paper retells the history of the encounters over HIV reporting that had occurred since the mid 1980s. In placing HIV reporting within a larger context, however, we understand the clash between privacy and public health necessity as a complex issue, both in historical and contemporary practice. By underscoring the similarities and differences with the histories of surveillance for other infectious diseases, vaccination, occupational diseases, cancer, and birth defects, and HIV reporting internationally, we can better understand the implications of the HIV debate for an ethics of surveillance more generally.