ABSTRACT
In affluent countries the AIDS epidemic hit a generation who had come to believe that the spectre of infectious disease not susceptible to medical treatment and prevention was a thing of the past. But as the prognosis for medical intervention comes to be more optimistic for the minority of the world's population with access to modern medical technology, HIV is becoming yet another threat to life in developing countries. Unlike other diseases with which such countries need contend, AIDS threatens above all the young and the healthy; that it is predominantly a sexually transmitted disease means that most of its direct victims are aged 15-45, so that the indirect victims of this epidemic include millions of children and other dependents of the formerly young and healthy.
