"What are you afraid of?" she asked
"AIDS, my dear. I am afraid of AIDS..." replied Ron, while
adjusting the rubber muff around his clutch.

As the move broke his momentum, Ron could not help thinking that if
HIV was transmitted by any other medium than sex, few would be
talking about the infection it causes today. It seems like even
starvation is a more tolerable than sexual abstinence.

If the poignant spectacle of a dying AIDS patient, so common of on
American hospital wards ten years ago, is now scant, the situation
outside the U.S.A. and Western Europe is alarming. The infection has
morphed into a sanitary scourge, a pandemic that, by itself, has
reduced from 61 to 51 years, human life expectancy on our planet.

Since the early 1980s, when the first cases were diagnosed, 54
million people have been infected (in comparison, France population is
52 million); 18 million of these are now dead (population of
Australia: 18 million).

Today, 36 million people worldwide, of whom 1.5 million children,
are HIV positive. The majority of them don't know about it (and you
probably flirted with one of them some time this week).

Among these 36 million, 70% (25 million) live in sub-Saharan Africa,
the Southern half of the African continent.

In year 2000, 5.3 million people in the world got infected with the
virus, 3.8 million (70%) of them are Africans. That means, all
throughout this year, five new men and women got infected at every
single minute with the AIDS virus, a total 16,500 a day!

AIDS mostly hits and decimates the active, economically productive
groups of the population, age: 15 to 49. In South Africa, 20%
of this population carry the virus. In some villages of Sierra Leone,
the rate is around 75%, basically everybody...

A class of medications, the protease inhibitors, have been
instrumental in curbing, by 60%, the annual death rate due to HIV.
They have allowed, among others, Magic Johnson to continue his glitzy
seemingly happy-go-lucky life. 

But, if his example is a ray of hope for every HIV infected individual, it
should not be construed as a dispense license toward prevention. Seemingly
healthy HIV carriers live under tremendous limitations and stress. They often
have to take several pills a day at strict schedule in order not to fall sick.

In uneducated sectors, the trend has been to forgo condom, since
death is no longer the inevitable outcome of the infection.

But, this decline in mortality is observed only in First World (U.S,
Canada and Western Europe) where the infected can afford the $20,000
yearly price tag of the wonder drugs.

Six months ago in Durban, at the 13th annual AIDS conference, the
large pharmaceutical companies pledged to sell the drugs at a much
affordable price to Third World nations. But, these promises have yet
to materialize.

Some countries, like Brazil and India, have opted to illegally copy
and distribute the patented medications. Pfizer and the likes have
not reacted so far.

At the beginning of the epidemics, most infections were due to
needle sharing among IV drug users and homosexual intercourse between
gay men. Today, 80% of cases are due to heterosexual contact. Women
are most likely than men to become infected. This is related to the
large volume of the infected male ejaculate.

Ron thought of all of this and decided, to add a second condom on top of
the first....

(Odler Robert Jeanlouie, Sunday, December 3, 2000)