[DomStLeger]

Ok I just wanted to share with everyone some shocking stastics made avaliable on BBC News Online concerning the HIV epidemic.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/h...ml/default.stm

I had no ideas how big a problem it really is, with some areas in africa well above 20% of the population infected. Thats a shockingly high figure, and shows what huge problems these coutnries are likely to face over the next 10 to 20 years.

They predict 45million MORE people coud be infected with the disease in poorer countries by 2010 (thats ON TOP of the current 42million worldwide), with 29million of those cases preventable. I was also shocked to see that nearly 1 million americans have the disease, and 1.2 million russians (and growing fast in russia).

This really is a global catastrophe in the making. What upsets me most is there is realisticly nothing we can do ourselves to prevent it (apart from safe sex and thus protecting and ourselves and those around us). It's up to our governments to act and sadly the HIVirus is not high on anyones politcial agenda at the moment.

[Intrepid Homoludens]

There's also an unofficial count of it in the millions in China as well. The Chinese government, as the bunch of f#&ked-up c#nts that they are, grossly under-reported the numbers, and the spread of infection got so hideously high and out of control that they confessed they fudged up the numbers. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton is pushing to get billions of dollars in aid for Africa, and is pressuring China to educate and treatment its own citizens. He's doing a world more of a difference than that dickhead Bush is doing now.

[Titan]

Intrepid, did you miss the $15 billion Bush proposed in his last state of union speech for fighting AIDS in Africa. While appropriating all this money is a hard sell in congress due to the lack of honest governments in Africa and the plethora of civil wars that have plagued that continent for centuries, you're calling the wrong president a dickhead.

Seems to me that one could reasonably suspect Clinton's motivation is to avoid anything catching as he pursues his major focus in life.

[Intrepid Homoludens]

No, I didn't miss that, just as I didn't miss what he's been doing in Afghanistan.

What I meant, Titan, is that Clinton is out there, actually lobbying actively for help (it helps that he's no longer tied in the White House), and successfully brokering deals with pharmaceutical companies to cut costs of the the drugs for distribution to third world countries.