This article looks critically at the current literature about Aids and relates some of the assumptions to the concept of the `moral panic'. It discusses this concept in relation to what we know about mass communication effects today and looks at the encoding and decoding of messages in a specific social context. The article also examines the campaign on Aids which has been carried out in the UK and finally looks at the audience responses in opinion polls and in a small-scale study carried out at the Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester.
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