Wisconsin has the lowest rates of HIV in the nation, but that shouldn’t lull us into a false sense of security about the virus and the disease it causes.
AIDS remains the world’s No. 1 infectious disease, killing 3.1 million people each year. By the beginning of this year, an estimated 38.6 million people in the world were living with HIV infections or were ill with AIDS.
Half a million Americans have died of AIDS since 1981. There’s no cure, and an effective vaccine is at least a decade or more away, say UW-Madison researchers. This makes it even more imperative that people adopt protective behaviors.