"HIV/AIDS is a threat that is still invisible to the Malaysian public but it is nevertheless there. Already we have lost many citizens to an otherwise preventable disease because we have not been able to see the enemy. The enemy in this case is a tiny virus whose sole survival is dependent on the ignorance and denial by many that such a virus exists. HIV has been able to take advantage of all of man's weaknesses, but specifically man's unwillingness to accept the existence of what it cannot and does not want to see. And in so doing has wreaked devastation and suffering far beyond what man has ever been able to do by himself. Consider this: in 1999, 200,000 Africans were killed due to conflict. But two million Africans died of AIDS. We may be able to see a human enemy, we may equip ourselves with expensive guns in order to fight that enemy but we cannot inflict the sort of suffering that a tiny virus can inflict. This suffering is not limited to those who have been infected. 13.2 million children around the world have become orphans because of AIDS. In some countries in Africa, life expectancies have been shortened by some 20 years and the entire demographic picture of those countries have changed. A generation, those in the young productive ages have been lost and the impact on countries cannot be easily rectified. Essentially, AIDS is an impoverishing disease for countries because it strikes at the very people who can help to develop a country. In addition, AIDS is altering the global economic scenario, perhaps in a more unfair way than globalisation itself. It is clear from the global AIDS pandemic that the countries that are suffering most from AIDS are those that are the poorest, the ones most crippled by debt, the ones least stable. In addition AIDS makes them even poorer because these countries have the least capability to provide treatment for those who have become infected. The net result is that the gap between the rich and the poor, the North and the South, becomes even wider."