The United Nations estimates that there are currently 33.6 million people infected worldwide with the AIDS virus. The disease is spreading at a rate of 10,000 people each day . It is estimated that the number of people infected with the AIDS virus by the end of the year 2000 will be 55 million. AIDS is fast becoming the most efficient killer of young adults in history.
Hospitals are packed, even as health-care workers die at alarmingly high rates.
In South Africa, people who openly say they are HIV positive often are treated as outcasts, fired from their jobs and sometimes even chased from their homes. In 1998, Gugu Dlamini, a woman in KwaZulu-Natal province, was beaten to death after revealing during World AIDS Day that she was infected. The United Nations estimates that there are currently 33.6 million people infected worldwide with the AIDS virus. The disease is spreading at a rate of 10,000 people each day . It is estimated that the number of people infected with the AIDS virus by the end of the year 2000 will be 55 million.