Global Health

PREVENTABLE DISEASES KILL MORE PEOPLE each year than do wars and natural disasters. Increasing public awareness of global health challenges is a critical first step toward improving the lives of billions of people around the globe. Here are some highlights from TIME's coverage of such diseases as HIV/AIDS, malaria, SARS, and other illnesses that could be prevented.

According to the official count, India has 5.13 million HIV/AIDS sufferers, while the U.N.'s estimate is up to 8.5 million.... India has a lot of owning up to do, as health workers at the Gates Foundation know. As they fan out across India to study and quantify the country's sex industry, they are discovering a sexuality far more active and diverse than anyone suspected.
From AIDS in India: When Silence Kills
By Alex Perry
May 30, 2005

Much of the one-sixth of humanity in extreme poverty suffers the ravages of AIDS, drought, isolation and civil wars, and is thereby trapped in a vicious cycle of deprivation and death.
From The End of Poverty
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Mar. 14, 2005

Everybody knows that Asia is supposed to be the last great frontier of the tobacco industry, a place where vast numbers continue to expose themselves to the risks of lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, emphysema and other smoking-related illnesses.
From Can Asia Kick the Habit?
By Liam Fitzpatrick
Feb. 28, 2005

The latest figures suggest that malaria sickened 300 million people last year and killed 3 million--most of them under age 5.... What makes the malaria deaths particularly tragic is that malaria, unlike AIDS, can be cured.
From Death By Mosquito
By Christine Gorman
Jul. 26, 2004

Health officials have long been worried that the next deadly global epidemic — a slate wiper, as epidemiologists call it — would be a new kind of deadly flu to which humans have no resistance.
From The Revenge of the Birds
By Anthony Spaeth
Feb. 9, 2004

In recorded history, no disease has jumped the species barrier to infect humans, caused an epidemic and then never threatened us again — not without the discovery of a vaccine or cure to curtail the microbe.
From The Race to Contain a Virus
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
Jan. 19, 2004

Up to 1 million Chinese are HIV positive, and that number could easily grow to 10 million by 2010, according to the Joint U.N. Program on AIDS.
From China's Secret Plague
By Alice Park
Dec. 15, 2003

There is reason to suspect that Chinese health authorities are continuing to cover up the extent of the crisis. Government sources told TIME that the country's leaders are so terrified of a SARS outbreak in Shanghai, the country's densely packed commercial center, that they have ordered bureaucrats there to preserve the city's 'SARS-free' reputation at any cost.
From Tale Of Two Countries
By Romesh Ratnesar and Hannah Beech
May 5, 2003

As the truth about SARS comes out—slowly, due in large part to government cover-ups in the land of its birth—it is becoming clear that what is taking place in Asia threatens the entire world.
From The Truth About SARS
By Michael D. Lemonick and Alice Park
May 5, 2003

What researchers fear most: AIDS is about to explode in the world's most populous nations—China and India.... China, with its 1.3 billion people, looms as an especially large and potentially devastating target for the virus.
From Stalking a Killer
By Tim McGirk and Susan Jakes
Sep. 23, 2002
Photos and Graphics

Economic-development and family-planning programs have helped slow the tide of people, but in some places, population growth is moderating for all the wrong reasons. In the poorest parts of the world, most notably Africa, infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria, cholera and tuberculosis are having a Malthusian effect.
From The Challenges We Face
By Jeffrey Kluger and Andrea Dorfman
Aug. 26, 2002

By the end of the 20th century, vaccines had conquered many of man's most dreaded plagues, eliminating smallpox and all but wiping out mumps, measles, rubella, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio, at least in the developed world.
From Vaccines Stage A Comeback
By Michael D. Lemonick and Alice Park
January 21, 2002

As the HIV virus sweeps mercilessly through these lands ... a few try to address the terrible depredation. The rest of society looks away.
From Death Stalks a Continent
By Johanna McGeary
Feb. 12, 2001
Photos and Graphics

E. coli is not an easy bug to pick up. It's not an airborne pathogen like a flu virus, and it can have an ill effect only if it's ingested. The vast majority of people who do come down with the infection survive if they are kept hydrated and, in some cases, hospitalized.
From Anatomy of an Outbreak
By Jeffrey Kluger
Aug. 3, 1998

What allowed this avian virus to cross the species barrier and set up killing infections in man? Why did it strike the young and hardy with the most ferocity — just as the 1918 virus had? And, most important, … is it circulating more quietly, primed for a 'reassortment event' that will set off the next global disaster?
From The Flu Hunters
By Erik Larson
Feb. 23, 1998

The fight against infectious disease is neither a leisurely war of attrition nor a desperate retreat. Instead, it looms as a protracted guerrilla conflict in which reliable intelligence and rapid reaction are the keys to survival.
From Guerrilla Warfare
By Michael D. Lemonick
Sep. 18, 1996

New scourges are emerging — AIDS is not the only one — and older diseases like tuberculosis are rapidly evolving into forms that are resistant to antibiotics, the main weapon in the doctor's arsenal ... For all the vaunted power of modern medicine, deadly infections are a growing threat to everyone, everywhere.
From The Killers All Around
By Michael D. Lemonick
Sep. 12, 1994

With eyes full of parasitic worms and skin covered by itchy nodules, the adults suffer from onchocerciasis, a disease that afflicts 18 million people in the developing world and permanently blinds 500,000 each year.
From Miracle Worker Cure for River Blindness
Nov. 2, 1987