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Where is AIDS having the biggest impact?

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• Nearly 40 million people are now living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, roughly 95% of them in developing countries. Sub-Saharan Africa alone is home to some 25 million with HIV/AIDS, roughly 63% of the world total. AIDS is also impacting other regions. Asia how has over 7 million people with HIV/AIDS, and that number is growing rapidly.
   
• AIDS now kills many times more Africans yearly than war, with an African dying of AIDS every 14 seconds. Deaths resulting from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa will soon surpass the 20 million people in Europe who died in the plague of 1347. AIDS is expected to slash overall economic activity in Africa by 25%.
   
• Globally, about 4.5 million children under the age of 15 have been infected since the start of the epidemic, a large proportion of them girls. In 2003 630,000 children were newly infected with HIV. Globally, a child dies of AIDS almost every minute. That's 1,342 every day.
   
• Some 12 million African children have lost one or both parents to AIDS, and the number of AIDS orphans worldwide could reach 40 million by the year 2010.
   
• Globally, 13,150 people become infected with HIV every day. In 2003, 4.8 million people were newly infected. The epidemic continues to devastate sub-Saharan Africa and is also spreading rapidly in the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and many parts of Asia.
   
• Continued gender discrimination creates life-threatening dangers for women around the world. Indeed, few diseases are as rooted in gender inequality as HIV/AIDS. In sub-Saharan Africa, close to 60% of all adults with AIDS are women, and 75% of all young people aged 15 to 24 with HIV/AIDS are female. More than 6,000 women were newly infected with HIV everyday in 2003.