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The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives - and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

It's the advantage of the virus to spread, and you can only spread when you infect people and they infect other people without necessarily killing them. So if you had 100 percent mortality, the potential pandemic would almost self-eliminate itself.

In fact, a large majority of those have died and of those expected to die of AIDS, as well as of those who are infected with the virus, are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Infectious diseases have become less prominent as causes of death and disability in regions of improved sanitation and adequate supplies of antibiotics.

To date, nearly 100,000 Hispanics have died with AIDS. Since Hispanics are the fastest growing minority group in the United States, our challenge is even greater.

The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.

Back in the 1960s, the number of deaths each year from unintentional poisoning was 15 times greater than it is today.

Living with AIDS is like always having the sword of Damocles over your head. The disease is scarier than death itself. The disease is so messy, so devastating, so pervasive. It robs you of everything you hold dear.