In certain areas of Africa, one in four adults is infected with the virus that causes AIDS, and around the world the disease now rivals the greatest epidemics of history, according to a UN report. In the first country-by-country analysis of the disease, the United Nations said that last year 30 million people worldwide were infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, and that 21 million were in Africa.
In 13 of those countries, HIV has infected at least 10 percent of adults, and in Botswana and Zimbabwe, a quarter of adults are infected, a rate that even an expert described as "shocking."
AIDS is hitting Africa so fiercely that it now rivals the great epidemics of history--the Black Death of the Middle Ages that killed 20 million people, or one-quarter of Europe's population, in four years and the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 that killed 20 million people, including half a million Americans.
Infection rates exceed one in three adults in some major African cities and reach 70 percent of women tested in some prenatal clinics. Worldwide last year, 5.6 million people were newly infected while 2.3 million died from AIDS.