ABSTRACT
As I write, in the late wet London summer of 1992, it is reported that 6,279 people have so far been diagnosed with AIDS in the United Kingdom since the epidemic was first identified in 1981. Of these, 3,913 are already dead.2
In the United States, however, which has between four and five times the population of Britain, there have been 230,179 cases of AIDS diagnosed, 41,598 of which were in New York.3 Whilst in the UK it is estimated that there are between forty and one hundred thousand people infected by HIV, it is thought that at least one million people are infected in the US. Indeed, the American epidemic is fast approaching what epidemiologists refer to as a ‘steady state’. That is, the annual rate of AIDS-related deaths is quickly catching up with the annual rate of new cases of HIV infection, currently running at around 50,000 per annum. Meanwhile the World Health Organisation (WHO) calculates that there are as many as ten million people infected worldwide, a projection that many experts think conservative.4
