Twenty years after the first annual World AIDS Day, we are celebrating December 1st with red ribbons, product red clothes, and celebrity benefit concerts. After twenty years of increased awareness and promises, the number of people in the world living with HIV/AIDS has decreased from 40 million to 33.2 million today. That is a big accomplishment, but there are still 33.2 million people out there. That’s one in every two hundred people. This year alone, around 2.5 million people have become infected with the virus and around 2.1 million have died from it. Of the total amount of people living with HIV/AIDS, 95% are in developing countries.

It seems that the knowledge of AIDS is widespread among Americans today. Yet several decades ago, the vast majority was ignorant of the disease, and therefore we had many more cases than we do today. Ignorance plays a major role in the spread of HIV/AIDS, and now that America is saturated with AIDS awareness, we forget that the rest of the world is far behind. In some parts of Nigeria, a study showed that only 47 percent of men and 50 percent of women knew about AIDS. Similar findings in the neighboring countries help to explain why two thirds of the people living with AIDS and eight out of every 10 children in the world whose parents have died of AIDS live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Ignorance of the disease coincides with another major factor in the spread of AIDS - that of the fear and stigma that surrounds the disease. Shame, the tendency to avoid speaking about sex, and the fear of contracting the disease keep people from getting tested and treated. Some AIDS victims are even abandoned by their own family. Can you imagine casting a member of your family out just because he or she had cancer? In fact, if anything, a disease should attract more attention and care. Women with AIDS have it especially hard because of their position in society. In many cultures, it is not acceptable to question their partners, or insist that they use condoms, and when they end up with the virus, it is not their partner’s fault, but their own. Preventing AIDS is only going to be successful when the status of women around the world is improved.

Then there’s the lack of clinics and medicine. As much as we are trying to implement free testing clinics and treatment centers, the majority of the people we are trying to get to live in rural areas days from a major village or city. The clinics that do exist tend to give free testing, but they cannot afford to give AIDS medicine to the thousands of people who need it. Without an actual cure, treatment of AIDS is a long and relatively expensive process, and many families live to far away to be able to travel to and from the clinic, or cannot pay even the small fee some charity doctors require.

The biggest cause of HIV/AIDS is not necessarily the lack of clinics or the cultural ignorance, but it does encompass all of those factors. Simply put, the biggest cause of HIV/AIDS is poverty, although the problem of poverty can be anything but simple. The cycle of poverty and AIDS is an endless one. AIDS is so rampant in developing countries because those countries are poor and cannot afford clinics, health care, and education about safe sex and condoms. Furthermore, AIDS is also a cause for the spread of poverty. Because most of the people that die of AIDS are in their twenties and thirties, the disease is wiping out a whole generation of working class citizens. Only the very young and the very old remain. Without laborers or teachers or parents, the economies of these countries are failing.

What can be done about AIDS? We already stress the importance of using condoms and other forms of birth control. However, we cannot just provide treatment to AIDS patients, nor can we only hand out condoms like candy. The only way we are going to be able to conquer AIDS is if we destroy its root causes. Education is the key. We must have a way to reach out to the people of the world about AIDS in order to prevent new infections from taking place, improve quality of life for HIV positive people, and reduce stigma and discrimination. However, along with education, we must provide a means for the people to use their knowledge to make a difference.

Each year, World AIDS Day adopts a new theme around which the day revolves. Last year’s theme was “accountability”. This year, it is “leadership”, and the focus is not on leadership in the government, but leadership beyond the political spectrum. Everyone says we are the leaders of the future, but why can’t we be leaders now? 2015, the halfway milestone for the Millennium Development Goals and the fight against AIDS and poverty, is only seven years away. 2010, the deadline for the world’s goal of universal treatment for AIDS, is only 3 years away. According to its most common definition, universal access to treatment is achieved when 80% of all people in urgent need of treatment are receiving it, which means that by the end of 2010, ten to sixteen million people should be receiving treatment.

Governments of industrialized rich countries agreed to allot 0.7% of their annual budgets to the fight against AIDS. Only a few countries, however, have kept their promise. We, as citizens, may not have as much power and influence as our government does over AIDS prevention, but we do have a degree of power and influence over our government. With the youth’s use of technology today, we can effectively impact thousands of people across the country. AIDS is the “biggest preventable and treatable threat to humankind in the 21st century,” says Greg Gray, the International Coordinator of the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition. It is up to us to keep our promise. We must stop AIDS.