On World AIDS Day last year, I was standing next to a Staffordshire Buddies display at one of the many public events when someone said to me “it isn’t really the problem everyone thought it was going to be is it?” The thought that flashed through my mind is “Where do I begin…?”

How many people have to be infected before everyone will care about HIV? Clearly the 32,000 diagnoses in the UK are not enough because most people still think it won’t affect them. Even the half a million infections in Western Europe hasn’t woken people up. So how about six million? Does that feel like a big enough number to care about? Well that’s the number of people who became infected with HIV around the World in 1998; just one year and the World has 6 million more people living with HIV - men and women, young and old, gay and straight, adults and children.

UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS estimated that by the end of 1998, 47 million people had been infected with HIV since the epidemic began. For 1999 you can add at least another 6 million people to that figure and probably a lot more. 14 million adults and children had died of AIDS and HIV related illnesses by the beginning of this year and more people than ever before are dying each day.

In the minute it has taken you to read this article so far, another eleven people will have become infected with HIV, and 5 people who were previously infected will have died. Look into the figures and think about human beings – somebody’s son, daughter, child, mother, father, husband, wife, partner, friend, neighbour… the scale of the tragedy is just too big to take in.

Sex, disfigurement and death – the big taboos; its hardly surprising that nobody wants to talk about one of the World’s biggest killers. Yet last year more people will have died with AIDS than in any war or famine. Its time everyone took their heads out of the sand. Lets stop talking about the gay epidemic, the heterosexual epidemic and the African epidemic and lets start doing something about the epidemic. Its time to put the World back into World AIDS Day.

In the UK one of our biggest weapons in the fight against AIDS is our excellent system of health care. Combination drug therapies mean that people who are infected with HIV live longer and enjoy a better quality of life. Groups most affected by the HIV epidemic have access to information and free condoms, and nationally millions of pounds are spent on targeted HIV prevention work.

Needless to say that in developing countries the picture is very different; there are fewer resources so standards of health care and disease prevention are poorer. No surprises there but what you may not know is that one of the main reasons developing countries can’t afford decent health care is because of the huge sums they are paying to rich countries like ours – read on.

In the early 1970s wealthy countries were awash with cash and wanted to make even more. So they offered loans to developing countries to help them advance. Big loans, low interest, great deals; who could say no? Then in the 1980s the unthinkable happened, the World economy slumped, interest rates soared and developing countries suddenly found that they could no longer pay off their loans. Since then most countries have paid back the original amount twice over but haven’t even kept pace with the interest. If you have ever had a problem keeping up with your credit card you may know the feeling.

So to give an example, in 1995 Uganda spent £10.35 per person on debt repayments while being able to afford only £1.83 per person on health. Write off the debt and the Ugandan Health Service could improve immediately. And with 10% of the Ugandan population infected with HIV no amount of health care could ever be too much.

So what will it cost creditors (including the UK) to write off all the debts owed by developing countries? About £4.5 billion, which may sound a lot but in the context of national economies its peanuts – its about as much as it cost to build Eurodisney. So forget the dome, a really great way to celebrate our hopes for a new millennium would be to write off these crippling debts. And the best way you can help get this done is to join the Jubilee 2000 campaign. “What is it?” well it’s a global campaign with hundreds of member organisations which in the UK includes the British Medical Association, Christian Aid and the TUC.

If you feel like a bit of healthy activism get on the Internet and go to http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/ for a full list of all the demonstrations and an impressive summary of the successes so far. If you don’t have access to the internet come to our Hanley centre or find a friend who has – the list of things going on is way too big to print here.

At the very least, buy and wear a “lapel chain” to show your commitment to “breaking the chains of debt” and tell everyone you meet what its all about. You can get them from Debt Lapel Chains, Christian Aid, PO Box 42, Birkenhead, L41 8FP. I’ve pinned mine on to my red ribbon as a reminder of the link between the debt crisis and the lack of health care for people with HIV in developing countries.

Just think about what it will mean when Jubilee 2000 wins, as it surely will.

In America, one year of anti HIV combination therapy costs over $10,000. In South Africa, the average income per person per year is under $1000. Needless to say that South Africa can’t afford to buy the drugs it needs but what it could do is make them itself. It is reckoned that South Africa could produce its own anti HIV drugs to use in effective combination therapy at a cost of about $200 per person per year. The reason it isn’t manufacturing them right now? Because the big drug companies have been fighting to control patents for the drugs in the US courts.

Just think about that. The only effective treatments we have for HIV, the product of years of research much of which was carried out with public money, protected by patents enforced worldwide. The big profit making companies don’t want these drugs being manufactured on the cheap regardless of the cost to human life. It’s disgusting. I’m glad to say that pressure is building for a climb down and there may be a breakthrough soon.

Imagine a devastating disease sweeping across your country, killing thousands of children and young people.

Imagine that in some towns two out of every five pregnant women had this disease and risked passing it to their child.

Imagine it wiping out so many of the young adult population that kids had to be brought up by the ageing and infirm.

Imagine that the mothers of a tenth of the country’s children had died leaving them orphaned.

Imagine an economy crippled by death in its working population creating a spiral of deteriorating health care.

Imagine going to a school where so many teachers were dying that there were no classes for some of the children anymore.

Imagine standing in your local supermarket thinking that one in every ten people around you was infected.

Imagine members of your own family living with this disease knowing the drugs that could help are too expensive for your country to afford.

Imagine that you are in the Southern half of Africa and you don’t need to imagine any more.

This is the reality of AIDS.