By the year 2020, the number of cancer cases is expected to have soared from the current 10 million a year to 20 million. In Britain, it is predicted that one in two people will develop the disease, compared with the one in three today. The patients lie two to a bed and on the floor, waiting to be sent home to die. The sounds of sawing and hammering in the streets testify to the booming business done by the capital's coffin-makers. Public offices grind to a halt because so many workers are away at funerals.
Businesses are crippled when key employees die.
After coursing through other parts of Africa, AIDS is rampaging in southern Africa, turning the region into the epidemic's supernova and changing the nature of existence. Extraordinarily high death and infection rates are devastating families, threatening economies, creating a generation of orphans and lowering life expectancy in Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Malawi, Swaziland, Botswana and Namibia. All told, Africa south of the Sahara has two-thirds of the world's people infected with the AIDS virus, or 21 million. In Botswana and Zimbabwe, one of every four adults is infected with the AIDS virus, the UN AIDS program estimates. In Zimbabwe, where bodies are filling morgue corridors, 1.2 million adults will die from the disease by 2005, the government says.