Since the beginning of the 1980s, the Auto Immune Deficiency Syndrome, known by its acronym AIDS, has become the world's most widely spread and most feared disease. An astronomical amount of money and energy has since been invested by governments and by private agencies in the attempt to know more about this deadly disease and to find a cure as well as a vaccine against it. Yet, unfortunately, whatever progress has been registered seems to dwarf the tragic advance of this modern equivalent of the medieval Black Death.
According to the World Health Organization, by the end of 1994 governments had notified it of 1,025,073 cases of AIDS since record-keeping began in 1980, although the true figure was probably more than four times higher (AP, 1995, p. A2). The agency said that chronic undereporting and underdiagnosis in developing countries meant the actual number of AIDS cases was probably more than 4.5 million. W.H.O., an agency which is part of the United Nations, said that more than 70 percent of the estimated cases were in Africa, while about 9 percent were in the United States alone, 9 percent in the rest of the American hemisphere, 6 percent in Asia and 4 percent in Europe. These statistics included only people with active cases of AIDS or those who had died of the disease (AP, 1995, p. A2).
Soon after the W.H.O. statistics were made public, another set of data which caused no little concern came out. By the end of January, 1995, the U.S. Federal Centers for Disease Control (C.D.C.) in Atlanta reported that AIDS had become the leading cause of death among all Americans 25 to 44 (Altman, 1995, p. C7). AIDS has thus surpassed unintentional injury, the government's category for accidents. Also according to the report, cancer and heart disease were third and fourth, followed by homicides and suicides.
Dr. Harold H. Jaffe, a top AIDS official at the C.D.C., commented that "'AIDS was expected to rise to the top of the...