aids
...t, non sexist disease. It loves to kill you all. In the next five years the cases of newly infected Britons will go up by a horrifying 50%. Everyone is at risk. Heterosexual infections (especially among you people) are most common, because that sector of society assumes that they would never come into contact with the virus. AIDS is everywhere. It is so simple to contract HIV. In a world where weakened humanity has no cure, knowledge is power. When the AIDS ‘safe sex’ warnings came out in the eighties, I was one. The innocents of that first infected generation cannot afford that innocence anymore. It is so important to arm ourselves, to build up the Arsenal. So important to survive. Condoms are a weapon. They are not patented and not expensive. However, this July saw a 2 billion shortage of condoms in Africa alone. Shockingly, there is no organisation that provides free condoms world wide. Education is vital in Africa, but with no ‘tools’ to practise safe sex the futility of charities’ efforts grows. To quote Mandela, we must “follow what we say by doing something practical”, otherwise “eloquence is useless.” AIDS killed three million people in 2002. That is the population of Israel. If that whole country was wiped out by terrorism the world would act. Soon, one in three children will be orphaned in Sub Saharan Africa as a direct result of AIDS. Due to a lack of knowledge, acknowledgement and contraception, AIDS is even more rampant here. Half of all new infections are in people under 25 years old. One in four Zimbabwean adults has AIDS . This pandemic is culling humans on a scale akin to livestock. Not only is it decimating the people, AIDS has actually reversed the socio - economic progress of developing countries. One startling illustrator of this is Mandela’s own nation of South Africa, whose Gross National Product (a.k.a. general wealth indicator) will fall by 17% in the next eight years. In the same country, life expectancy is set to plummet by twenty years because of AIDS. This is huge. One terrifying factor, rarely considered, is that 7 million of this war’s casualties have been farmers. More of them are dying. This has potential repercussions of food shortages and global hu...