Shocking Facts

I was doing some research for reports I am working on and I ended up in the US Census AIDS webpage. I was looking through some of the links and I was shocked to read some of these facts:

An estimated 37.8 million (between 34.6 million and 42.3 million) people were living with HIV worldwide in 2003

In 2003, an estimated 4.8 million (between 4.2 million and 6.3 million) people were newly infected with HIV

About 7 percent of the people in low and middle income countries who need anti-retroviral drugs actually received them in 2003.

Every day 2000 babies are infected with HIV during pregnancy, at birth or through breastfeeding. Without effective medical interventions, at last one third of the infants born to HIV-positive mothers contract the virus. Most of the infants that contract the virus will die before their fifth birthday.

Every day there are about 14,000 new HIV infections worldwide. Of these more than 95 percent occur in low and middle income countries and about 2000 are among children under 15.

It is a shame that in this day and age and with all of the advances we have made in the past years we still don't have a full grasp on the AIDS epidemic. The medication needed to live a healthy and normal life is so expensive that most people who don't have medical insurance are not able to afford it, and those people with medical insurance often have to do without other necessities in order to pay for all of their medication.

The good news, I heard on NPR the other day, is that a Swedish company is now manufacturing low-cost AIDS medication that will be distributed to the "third world" countries.

If you are not shocked, you should be. By now all of us know at least one person who is infected with HIV, and if you think you don't then you are just fooling yourself. You should be shocked that our governments have not spent enough money to edecuate the public. You should be shocked that medications are still out of the reach of most people. And you should be shocked that 14,000 people are infected each day.