Honduras, a haven for sweatshops and prostitution, a region still reeling economically from Hurricane Mitch's epic fury 16 months ago, is pathetically poor. Eighty percent of its six million inhabitants live below the poverty line. Accurate AIDS statistics are hard to come by. Until this year, no one even kept score on reported AIDS patients. The government collected numbers from official labs, but didn't track what happened.
Truer numbers come from hospitals and coroners.
They count corpses. Officials and doctors disagree sharply about the numbers. In Africa they multiply by 60. We are finding new cases every single day. Lopez belives that HIV infection in the city of San Pedro Sula alone could be as high a 240,000 - nearly half the residents.