Page Content (OCR)
Global Programme on AIDS from 193 countries. This represents a 26 percent increase from the 1,025,073 cases reported in the 3 January, 1995 Update (and in the Weekly Epidemiological Record of 13 January 1995)." "Through mid-1996, an estimated 27.9 million people worldwide had been infected with HIV, of whom approximately 7.7 million have developed AIDS."!2? Also by the year 2000, between 30 and 40 million men, women, and children will have been infected with HIV More than 90 percent of all people with HIV infection will be A disturbing epilogue to the HIV virus saga is that evidence is mounting that this virus was deliberately "engineered" by scientists who combined strains of the Bovine Leukemia Virus and the Sheep Vishna Virus in a laboratory setting. An increasing number of scientists believe that the virus was introduced into the human population through contaminated vaccines! 190 The Hanta virus created a panic in the American Southwest when numerous people died from this rodent-borne virus near several Indian reservations in New Mexico. The year 1995 also brought an upsurge of the flesh-eating streptococcus bacteria when a number of people were infected during a summer out-break in several regions of the United States. In 1996, the Ebola virus reared its ugly head in Africa when it killed dozens of people rapidly and catastrophically by literally dissolving their internal organs in a matter of days. There is no cure for either the Ebola virus or the Hanta virus at this time. In addition to these threats, a number of bacterial organisms that were once thought controlled made a comeback in the 1980s and 1990s. With the dramatic increase in the use of antibiotics on HIV/AIDS patients, who are frequently infected with multiple pathogenic organisms, there has been a dramatic rise in the incidents of antibiotic- resistant bacteria. The most dangerous among those is the multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis strains which have begun to crop up around the United States, Europe, and a 1. 1 1 o In 1994, the plague, which killed millions of Europeans prior to the invention of antibiotics, made a comeback when India suffered 90 consecutive days of 100-degree weather. The hot weather drove rats into the cities, causing an outbreak of pneumonic plague. The outbreak killed 63 people and ultimately cost India two billion dollars in cleanup, medical bills, and prevention. Paul Epstein, an epidemiologist with the Harvard school of Public Health, stated that "the real threat for people . . . may not be a single disease, but armies of emergent microbes raising havoc among a host of creatures." In the last 100 years there has been a dramatic increase in the frequency and intensity of earthquakes worldwide. In the last 15 years, in California alone earthquakes have increased dramatically—with killer quakes, those greater than 6.0 on the Richter scale, 100 As of this printing WHO estimates, from developing countries. In the 1990s Americans have been introduced to several additional pestilences which have accelerated in recent years. other industrialized nations. EARTHQUAKES IN VARIOUS PLACES