An all-time high of 34 million people now live with AIDS, according to the UN's annual report (pdf):
Perhaps the most dramatic achievement of 2010, the report says, was a 20 percent increase in the use of “antiretroviral therapy” in Africa over the prior year. A decade ago, the life-extending drugs were available in Africa only to members of the elite and a few ordinary people enrolled in clinical studies. Today in low- and middle-income countries around the world, 47 percent of people who meet the clinical criteria for antiretroviral therapy are getting it — 6.6 million out of 14.2 million eligible.
Much of that treatment is underwritten by the U.S. government through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, started by George W. Bush, and by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a charity principally funded by the United States and European countries.
Wehner quotes Albert Camus’ The Plague:
Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down. The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague.
In this world there are lots of hands and hearts that deserve credit for no bowing down, for deciding to fight the plague. Very near the top of the list belongs the name George W. Bush.
There is no denying this, it seems to me. Or that without the West, Africa would have endured an unending catastrophe.
(Photo: Patients live with HIV/AIDS at a medical facility at a Buddhist Temple in Lopburi province, north of Bangkok, on November 27, 2011. A significant expansion in access to treatment helped slash the number of AIDS-related deaths in 2010, bringing the number of people living with HIV to a record 34 million, the United Nations said. By Pornchai Kittiwongsakul/AFP/Getty Images.)
The Dish 