This will be a column of two halves. Sorry, but it's not a cheery or funny column, just for a change. A story in yesterday's paper suggested that in 2006, 8000 people per day died of AIDS around the world - that's 2.9 million people. Looking into it, I find that the UN AIDS programme agrees with the numbers. Appallingly, 2.1 million of the total deaths come from sub-Saharan Africa (compared with 'only,' for example, 12,000 in western and central Europe). In 2006 there were 2.8 million new infections in Sub-Saharan Africa (of 4.3 million new infections worldwide) and there were 24.7 million people in sub-Saharan Africa living with HIV (of 39.5 million worldwide). To put this into context, 39.5 million people is approximately the same as the total population of Shanghai, Los Angeles, Paris and Cape Town. The world's largest soccer stadium, the Maracana in Rio de Janiero, holds around 100,000, so that's nearly 400 giant soccer stadiums full of people living with HIV. And for the vast majority of them, that means dying of AIDS: less than one in four of those infected in low and middle income countries had access to anti-retroviral therapies.
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