AIDS came in in the early eighties, and was still in 1985 mostly an object of jokes. I remember one: "What is the worst feature of having AIDS? Having to convince your own mother that you are Haitian" - early on, Haiti was associated with the disease. You can see that people had some trouble taking it seriously, and that is exactly because such one-time scourges as syphylis were regarded as altogether defanged. Another thing I remember is the curious turn of phrase of a French dirty mag mentioning VD: "ces maladies dites honteuses et en verite' emmerdants..." - "these illnesses called shameful, and effectively annoying." You may call this attitude irresponsible, but it was hard for the popular imagination to awaken to the fact that an once-tamed fear could still have teeth. It was, in fact, the conservative governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who, through powerful and well-aimed publicity campaigns, managed to drive home to the majority of the population the seriousness of the issue.