Estimated worldwide HIV infections: 43 271 892 at 2.27pm Thursday September 13 2001.
World praise: Botswana, Brazil, Thailand and Uganda were given awards for their actions against Aids at the beginning of an international conference on the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
Vaccine hope? Scientists attending a conference focused on the creation of a vaccine against HIV say they are more hopeful than ever that a vaccine will be developed – but that it is likely to take at least a decade. There has been a scattering of preliminary positive results, such as monkeys given a trial vaccine that have so far survived for more than 600 days lethal doses of simian HIV.
Call to action: Leading medical journals have acccused the pharmaceutical industry of interfering in human clinical trials of new drugs, and have called for greater independence of such research.
Breast may not be best: If HIV-positive pregnant women stop breastfeeding and take anti- retroviral drugs that counter the transmission of the virus, the infection rates in babies could be cut by 70% to 80%.