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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chris land who wrote (125366)	2/4/2001 8:27:39 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Thanks for your thoughts. Thanks to the person who sent me this in PM. Read it and weep. (Do you weep for the born, Mr. Land?) nytimes.com Someday, we may look back on the year 2001 with nostalgia for a time when AIDS was merely a health catastrophe. Soon, AIDS in Africa will be doing more than killing millions every year. It will destroy what there is of Africa's economy and cause further instability and, perhaps, war. In the year 2010, the country of South Africa will be almost one-fifth poorer than it would have been had AIDS never existed. Throughout Africa, the disease has ravaged the young, urban and mobile. It has robbed schools of their teachers and hospitals of their doctors and nurses. Businesses are depleted by the need to cope with sick and dying employees. AIDS takes the breadwinner, leaving millions of destitute elderly and orphans who will grow up without going to school, many on the streets. As they lose their productive citizens, the nations themselves face collapse. At the moment, however, AIDS in Africa is only a plague of a severity not seen since the Black Death killed at least a quarter of Europe in the 14th century. A 15-year-old in South Africa has a better than even chance of dying of AIDS. One in five adults is infected with H.I.V. Hospitals are filled with babies so shriveled by AIDS that nurses must shave their heads to find veins for intravenous tubes. Seventeen million people have died prolonged and miserable deaths from AIDS, and that number is dwarfed by what lies ahead. While Africa is the region most ravaged, the disease is exploding elsewhere as well. India says it has four million infected; it may well have five times as many. Its AIDS epidemic bears a terrifying resemblance to South Africa's a few years ago -- AIDS is widespread in every risk group, and health care is inadequate. The Caribbean has the second-highest rate of infection after sub-Saharan Africa. More than one in 50 adults is H.I.V.-positive, and because the epidemic is primarily spread heterosexually there, most of the population is at risk. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the number of infected nearly doubled in the last year.............