A Continuing Epidemic.

Throughout the 1990s the worldwide Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic continued to take a devastating toll in human lives. In 1999 2.6 million people worldwide died from the disease, bringing the total number of deaths that year attributed to AIDS to 16.3 million. Although its effects were felt globally, by the end of the decade more than 70 percent of those infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) lived in sub-Saharan Africa. In the United States forty thousand new cases of AIDS were reported each year. In spite of these numbers, mortality rates in the United States declined dramatically. With the advent of new, expensive multidrug "cocktails" of potent, antiviral drugs, often including reverse transcriptase and protease inhibitors, a positive blood test for HIV was no longer seen as an immediate death sentence. AIDS fell from being the eighth leading cause of death in 1996 to fourteenth...