HIV and AIDS have become a major development issue. The fight against HIV has become crucial to achieving development and is a central part of the Millennium Development Goals.

UNAIDS warns that the AIDS pandemic has only just begun and if action is not taken to halt it, there could be 68 million AIDS-related deaths between 2000 and 2020. The UN names HIV and AIDS as the greatest threat to human development and a major risk to national and regional security. The International Federation of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement calls it “an unprecedented disaster that conventional intervention can no longer contain”.

The consequences of the pandemic are far reaching and those impacted are many. You do not have to have HIV and AIDS to have your life altered by it.

Up to 2005 there have been more than 25 million AIDS-related deaths since the first diagnosis of the illness in 1981 (UNAIDS/WTO).