Visitors driving through the province of KwaZulu Natal on a Saturday in 2002 would have noticed multiple tents set up throughout the countryside. Those tents signified funerals, and it was safe to assume many of them were being held for people who had died of complications from AIDS, which was ravaging South Africa at the time and KwaZulu Natal in particular. In addition to the funerals, visitors to the area would not have been able to ignore the many skinny, mortally ill people they saw in every city and rural neighborhood—mothers, fathers, and children dying because almost no medication was available in the country to combat the virus.
The situation in South Africa has improved since those darkest days, but AIDS and HIV still stalk this region, a reality recognized in particular on December 1, World AIDS Day. UNAIDS chooses this day each year to remind the world that AIDS is still a deadly, dangerous virus, which claimed the lives of 630,000 people in the last year. Although that is a sharp decrease from the high of 2 million deaths in 2004, UNAIDS reports that 39 million people around the globe are living with HIV, the virus that has led to more than 40 million deaths since…
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