Making community: Individuals and families living with and affected by haemophilia, HIV/AIDS and other blood borne viruses

This paper brings into question conceptualizations of community, specifically those that have been termed 'communities of shared interest and circumstance'. To do this, it explores the ways that people with haemophilia and their families experience and constitute community. Drawing on empirical data from semi-structured interviews and participation in joint activities, this paper details and describes the nature of the Australian haemophilia community. In doing this it addresses the role that advances in medical technologies and blood borne viruses, such as HIV, play in the production and maintenance of this community. Findings suggest that the haemophilia community is one steeped in historical intrafamilial genealogies and a network of other families, interfamilial, that pre-existed HIV and other blood borne viruses. As such, it is a more complex community than the term 'communities of shared interest and circumstances' suggests and has the potential to provide much to public health partnerships, which respond to HIV and other blood borne viruses that infect and affect others.