HIV is the most devastating disease of the 21st century. In the 14th century, the infamous bubonic plague took the lives of 35 million people. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that 3.1 million people died of AIDS in 2005, that 40.3 million people were l iving with HIV at the end of 2005, and that AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since the early 1980s. The 65 million people who either have died or will die due to AIDS since the beginning of the pandemic is greater than the number of people killed by the bubonic plague, or the total number of civilian and military casualties in World War II.

More than 15 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents to AIDS; that number is expected to reach 25 million by the year 2010.

The only pandemic to eclipse the death rates of AIDS is the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918-1919. Experts estimate that influenza killed between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide; that's between 2.8 and 5.6 percent of the global population at that time. (Source: John M. Barry. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2004), 397.)

The AIDS pandemic's devastation reaches far beyond those who are infected. More than 15 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents to AIDS; that number is expected to reach 25 million by the year 2010. As AIDS is killing people in the prime of their lives, many children will grow up in communities with massive shortages of teachers, health care workers, civil servants, and business people. This perpetuates many of the vicious cycles of poverty that further the spread of HIV.

HIV/AIDS is the world's largest health challenge. And with a wide range of experts agreeing that problems associated with AIDS will dominate the 21st century, it is clear that young people today will inherit a world devastated by AIDS.

All information taken from Acting on AIDS, www.actingonaids.org