NORMAL LIFE: The AIDS Timebomb

I am working my way through the largely entertaining, although bitchy and catty expose that is Rupert Everet's book, Red Carpets & Other Banana skins.

As gay as a gay man can be, Rupert cleverly works his way slowly through his life story and you can't help but wonder if most of what he is written is actually true or if he is just pandering to the sensationalism-hungry masses.

Halfway through the book, however, Rupert turns his attention to friends - or friends-of-friends, which is often the case because he is such an opportunistic creep - who have contracted HIV/AIDS. The virus is no longer a taboo and, in Europe, AIDS infections have steadily increased over the last couple of years mainly due a lack of consistent messaging among the young.

It got me thinking about an episode of Oprah that Bree and I watched one evening as we got ready to go out on our trip in South Africa last Christmas. The Angel Network presented five-time Grammy winner, Alicia Keys, with a check for $250,000 in recognition of her support of Keep A Child Alive, a global AIDS alliance striving to get antiretroviral medicines to the 95% of all people with HIV/AIDS living in impoverished countries that can't afford these medicines.

By the end of 2005, 77% of all orphans in Zimbabwe (some 1.1 million) had been orphaned because of AIDS. In South Africa, there are more than 1.2 million orphaned children living with HIV/AIDS. Worldwide, it is estimated that a staggering 15 million children under 18 have been orphaned as a result of AIDS while, in Sub-Saharan Africa, 9% of all children have lost at least one parent to AIDS.

Raising awareness of the plight of these children is an admirable thing, but 25 years after AIDS was officially acknowledged in the Western World, why is there still no cure? What will happen when these millions of children in Africa, uneducated, reach sexual maturity?

At the moment, the number of HIV/AIDS cases seems to have levelled-out, but when these kids reach sexual maturity, we are all in trouble; whole countries and their economies will collapse as, one by one, these adolescents - representing their nation's future labour fource - succumb to this horrid virus.

I'm in two minds about Alicia Keys' and Oprah Winfrey's public awareness campaign. How much will it take before governments around the world realise that this is a global issue, and rally behind this cause? Why is it increasingly left to celebrities to use their status to get issues addressed rather than swept under the carpet?

Together, we are stronger. Apart, there's trouble ahead.