TWENTY-FIVE years ago the diagnosis of pneumonia in five young men in the US signalled the emergence of a new disease. Today we call it AIDS, and last weekend the UN general assembly reviewed progress in our fight against it. Delegates found some cause for optimism, but the task ahead is daunting.
The scale of the epidemic is huge. UNAIDS, the UN agency coordinating the fight, estimates that 38.6 million people are living with HIV. Last year, 4.1 million people acquired the virus and 2.8 million died because of it. The proportion of the world’s population with HIV does, however,…
