Editor's Note

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Bill Gates Sr., co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and father of the chairman of Microsoft, begin today a five-day journey to three African nations. As they travel, President Carter and Mr. Gates will periodically file their thoughts and impressions with Slate.

Accompanied by public health staff from the Carter Center and the Gates Foundation, President Carter and Mr. Gates will visit South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya in an effort to focus attention on HIV/AIDS prevention in those countries and around the world.

According to UNAIDS, an estimated 25.3 million Africans were living with HIV at the end of 2000—more than 70 percent of the worldwide total on a continent with less than 15 percent of the world population. But HIV/AIDS should not be seen as an African epidemic. It is growing at alarming rates in the former Soviet Union, in China, in India. In Africa, where HIV/AIDS came earlier and is more advanced, the economic and social implications of the pandemic are massive. In South Africa, an estimated 4.7 million men, women, and children are living with the virus, more than 10 percent of the population. HIV prevalence among pregnant women has risen to its highest level: 24.5 percent. In Nigeria, the continent's most populous nation, the prevalence rate has hit 5 percent—a critical tipping point where the disease must either be stopped or risk soaring to numbers greater than South Africa. And in Kenya, where President Daniel arap Moi has called the disease a national disaster, prevalence rates remain at double-digit levels.

These rates of infection have staggering consequences. Across the continent, wage earners are steadily taking on more dependents as mothers and fathers die from the disease. Households cut food consumption and sell assets to pay for health care and funerals. Governments are losing valuable civil servants. Health care systems are losing up to a quarter of their personnel as nurses die from AIDS faster than new ones can be trained. Last year, according to U.N. estimates, approximately 1 million African schoolchildren lost their teachers to AIDS. At the same time, people across the continent are making determined efforts to combat the epidemic, with notable successes. It is the hope of highlighting and expanding on these successes, and identifying new ones, that prompted President Carter and Mr. Gates to make this trip to Africa.