This week's United Nations report on the global AIDS crisis made very grim reading. In 2004 some 4.9 million more people were infected by HIV while 3.1 million have died of it - 8,500 a day. Overall about 40 million are infected, 17.6 million aged between 15 and 49. Of these a fast-diminishing majority (53 per cent) are men. Women are increasingly the most vulnerable to infection and this week's World Aids Day had a welcome focus on women and girls.
Their plight is most tragically illustrated in southern Africa where 57 per cent of infected adults are women. In South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, where one in four pregnant women have HIV, three quarters of HIV-positive young people aged between 15 and 24 are women. Many young women trade sex for the means to live, school fees, even bus fares. The choice for these women to abstain from sex is often notional. Regularly, the sex is with older partners who have multiple other partners, making women far more vulnerable than young men of the same age. And endemic violence against women and rape makes them yet more susceptible to infection. Illness among older women tends also to weigh disproportionately on family life. Clearly any approach to challenging AIDS must also incorporate a social dimension aimed at empowering women in traditional societies.
There is some good news. Funding through the Global Fund for AIDS has trebled to $6.1 billion as has the number of school children receiving counselling. The numbers receiving anti-retroviral drugs is up 56 per cent, but the needs of those who need them are rarely met. And only one in 10 vulnerable pregnant women receive treatment to prevent transmission. Doctors say it will be at least a decade before a vaccine will be available.
Resources are still the critical issue. To meet the challenge of donor fatigue, France's President Chirac this week called for the levying of an international tax on the profits arising from globalisation, an idea that has also been backed by Brazil's President Lula and more than 100 countries. It deserves serious consideration.
"No longer were there individual destinies," Albert Camus wrote in The Plague, "only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all." So with AIDS. We are all bound up in the tragedy whose eradication demands of us not just medicine and resources but major social, cultural and political change. Like war - often the engine of revolution - AIDS can destroy us. But it can become also the spur to change by summoning up the best we can be. However, we have yet to show we can answer that call.