Medical science has never cured a viral illness, and the AIDS virus hardly looks like the exception. Therapies now in the pipeline promise only to delay death. They are also wildly expensive for the Third World, where 90 percent of new infections are occurring and where annual health care spending can be less than five dollars per person.
Educational campaigns stand even less of a chance.
An urban gay man in his twenties can expect to see half his generation infected by the time he's in his fifties. In developing countries, illiteracy and poverty make education downright quixotic. As it stands, the World Health Organization estimates that 18.5 million people are already infected, and another person contracts HIV every nine seconds. But despite sound scientific reasons to believe an AIDS vaccine is possible, the effort to develop one has been largely abandoned by industry, neglected by activists, and slighted by government. That's less than the latest Kevin Costner move.