A Stitch in Haste

The Global AIDS crisis shows no sign of improving:

The world will not meet its goal of halting and reversing the spread of AIDS in 10 years if the disease continues to race faster than efforts to stop it, a senior U.N. AIDS specialist said on Thursday.

Presidents and prime ministers, meeting at the United Nations nearly five years go, set a series of Millennium Development Goals, among them halting and beginning to reverse by 2015 the spread of AIDS and HIV, the virus that causes it.
...
But some of the worst predictions have come to pass. Nearly half of those infected with HIV are women and girls, whether married or single, promiscuous or faithful.
...
Worldwide, the U.N. report said, some $8 billion will be available in 2005 to fund programs in 135 low- and middle-income countries, a dramatic 23 percent increase over the previous year.
...
The money comes mainly from the United States, which spent $2.4 billion last year, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — an independent organization of governments, business and private groups first proposed by Annan four years ago.

If there can be such a thing as "peacetime war crimes," then most African heads of state and all Roman Catholic Cardinals should hang. It's bad enough to demand that your people live in ignorance and misery. Now they're demanding that they die in ignorance and misery. When will enough be enough?

And a million thanks to the pharmaceutical companies and their ("greedy") profit motive for having given the world AIDS drugs, and perhaps eventually a vaccine.