Diary Prequel Package — page 250

particularly when he works for an Administration, which is unlikely to heed his words, is a tremendous statement of moral and political courage. I am not quite sure what we do now here to ensure that Tony's words aren't just a call-in-the-wilderness. The big AIDS organizations in the USA don't have the inclination or even the ability to take on the President or the Congress. Both branches of government know we're a paper tiger: a movement with a few loud voices, a few people willing to put their bodies on the line, but with little ability to affect their political lives. Unless the big US AIDS organizations step up at this moment they will continue their march into irrelevance for history. They can continue to issue press releases about how much the President has done and continue to kiss the ass of those in power, but that makes them sycophants, not leaders. The rest of us have to get to work: we need to mobilize and get our governments to make a new, substantial and sustained commitment to HIV/AIDS, to TB, to maternal and child health, to global health. We need to meet with parliamentarians, legislators, ministers and mayors. We need to write in our local papers about what Tony's words mean now for us: we can end this epidemic or beat it back deep into the corner. This is our year. The legacy we leave behind will either be our victory or an epidemic without end, passed down to our children and our children's children, a plague upon their houses. Gregg Science 1 July 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6038 p. 13 DOI: 10.1126/science.1209751 EDITORIAL AIDS: Let Science Inform Policy Anthony S. Fauci Anthony S. Fauci is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, U.S. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. E-mail: afauci@niaid.nih.gov. Thirty years have passed since the first cases of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) were reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. How does this anniversary compare to the 20th or the 10th? The differences are considerable, because we now have an unprecedented opportunity, based on solid scientific data, to control and ultimately end the AIDS pandemic. More than 60 million people have been infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) worldwide. More than 30 million have died, and 34 million are currently living with HIV infection. In 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, 2.6 million people became newly infected. The burden of HIV/AIDS is overwhelmingly felt in resource-poor countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, which are least equipped to deal with the disease. Although the toll is staggering, the scientific progress in HIV/AIDS research over 30 years has been extraordinary, particularly in the development of antiretroviral therapy (ART), which has proven to be life-saving to many millions. For decades, the idea of ending or even controlling the pandemic was a distant aspiration because we lacked sufficient evidence-based tools to convert the hope to reality. At this 30th anniversary, the situation