World AIDS Day

From the Economist magazine an article about the state of the AIDS pandemic on World AIDS Day, which will be December 1st. Click here to read the full article. The online article also has links to other resources from organizations like the UN. Below is a portion of the article:

THE death toll of this disaster is now ten times larger than that of last year’s Indian Ocean tsunami. Some 3m people have died of AIDS-related diseases in the past year alone, a sixth of them children. These miserable statistics make a mockery of much-touted promises to be treating many more people for AIDS by now. Where the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNAIDS hoped to see 3m people taking anti-retroviral drugs by the end of 2005—the widely trumpeted “3x5” initiative launched in 2003—barely a third of that number are now doing so. As a result, the silent tsunami is killing faster with each passing day...Some 40m people are probably infected with HIV—a population the size of Spain’s—and the greatest number are spread across parts of Africa where getting so much as an aspirin is tricky. Anti-AIDS drugs need to be taken daily and should be provided by trained nurses, kept within moderate temperatures and guarded from thieves. Ideally the patient should be monitored by doctors, blood samples regularly tested in laboratories, and treatment adjusted over time. In poor and hot countries, all that is proving hard to do. Even when they are available, the drugs should be taken on a full stomach, something the poorest in China, India and Africa too rarely enjoy. Even in middle-income countries with functioning health services, such as South Africa, rolling out treatment is proving slower and more painful than many hoped.


Here are some other op-eds and articles about World AIDS Day:

AIDS: The Strategy is Wrong by Richard Holbrooke
Evangelicals Venture Into AIDS Activism from the Washington Post
China Vows to Keep HIV Cases Under 1.5M from the Washington Post
On World AIDS Day, Bush Touts His Relief Program from the Washington Post

--Tom Hayes