AIDS Worldwide

According to a new United Nations report, worldwide “more than 50 million people have been infected with HIV-AIDS—the equivalent of the population of the United Kingdom—and 16 million have died,” says The Globe and Mail of Canada. “Research in nine African countries has revealed that 20 per cent more women than men are now infected with the disease” and that “teenaged girls [are] about five times more likely to be infected with HIV-AIDS than teenaged boys.” Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, describes the situation in Eastern Europe as “explosive.” The report points out that “the HIV infection rate in the former Soviet Union has more than doubled in the past two years, the steepest increase in the world.” Experts say that it is a reflection of the increase in intravenous drug use in that region. Around the world more than half of those infected with HIV-AIDS “contract the disease by age 25 and they typically die before their 35th birthday.”