Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise to join my colleagues here this afternoon to address what I consider to be one of the most pressing and important national security and international health issues that we will face in the coming decades: The HIV/AIDS pandemic, which is currently sweeping Africa. I wish to begin by giving my colleagues a sense of the scope and scale of this problem. Sub-Saharan Africa has been far more severely affected by AIDS than any other part of the world. Today, 23.3 million adults and children are infected with the HIV virus in Africa, which only has about 10 percent of the world's population, but nearly 70 percent of the worldwide total of infected people. Worldwide, about 5.6 million new infections will occur this year, with an estimated 3.8 million in sub-Saharan Africa--3.8 million people will contract HIV. Every day, 11,000 additional people are infected--1 every 8 seconds. All told, over 34 million people in Africa--the population of my State of California--have been infected with HIV since the epidemic began, and an estimated 13.7 million Africans have lost their lives to AIDS, including 2.2 million who died in 1998.”