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By the time you finish reading this sentence, somewhere in Africa someone was just infected with AIDS, and by the end of the day over 15,000 Africans will be infected with this deadly and virulent disease.

For comparison sake, 15,000 is nearly half of the UCLA undergraduate student population. Yet the truly horrible thing is that the same thing will happen tomorrow, the next day and every day after that.

The HIV/AIDS virus is decimating the African continent – over 29 million of the world’s 42 million AIDS victims live in Sub-Saharan Africa. If the rate of infection continues to rise at the same rate it has for the past 20 years, over 50 percent of the teenagers living in Sub-Saharan Africa will die of AIDS before their 50th birthday.

But these facts are only numbers on a page – numbers so large they don’t seem real. To get an idea of the scope of this pandemic, think of the Rose Bowl. Over 80,000 people can come to watch the Bruins play football. Now, try to realize that it would take over 60 full Rose Bowls to hold the number of people that will be infected with AIDS this year alone.

What can we possibly do to fight against such a deadly foe? Well, for starters, on Tuesday, President Bush signed a $15 billion global AIDS bill designed to help combat the spread of AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. In doing so, Bush stated it was the “moral duty” of the United States to fight AIDS around the world because “we believe in the value and dignity of every human life.”

There should be no cynicism or partisan criticism attached to this incredible act of compassion, since it is by far the biggest step taken by any government in the battle against AIDS. If this bill lives up to its potential, it will prevent over 7 million new infections, care for over 10 million AIDS victims and provide intensive treatments to over 2 million people.

However, despite the enormous amount of good this bill will accomplish, it is not nearly enough. Winning the war against AIDS in Africa is infinitely more complex than just sending large sums of money. It requires the much more difficult task of changing deep-rooted cultural beliefs about women’s rights, government and much more.

For example, because of cultural taboos against the education of women, it is not uncommon for a woman to become a Commercial Sex Worker, or prostitute, to support herself and her family. Lack of education makes sex the only commodity many of these women have to offer. A CSW might have 30 customers a week, many of whom are truckers or migrant workers, and because of the mobile nature of CSWs’ clients, an infected CSW can infect dozens of people every year.

Only when women can receive the educational and employment opportunities that are denied to them will this mode of infection be halted.

Further compounding the difficulty of ridding Africa of AIDS is the fact that over 40 million Africans are at risk of starvation. It is impossible for a body to fight both AIDS and hunger at the same time.

Yet if the attitudes of African governmental leaders were to change, this problem could almost be eliminated overnight.

For example, in Ethiopia and many other African countries, it is the man’s responsibility to handle the farm work. However, large numbers of men have been killed in senseless wars fought between neighboring countries. Since 1997, over 3.3 million people in Congo alone (most of them men) have died because of the easily preventable warfare that has racked their country. Nations simply can’t successfully combat AIDS when violence and hunger are draining their populations.

Issues such as widespread starvation and commonplace prostitution seem alien to those living in the United States, but these are some of the everyday problems that African men and women face in the fight against AIDS. While the United States should continue to financially support the war against AIDS, the United States should also take a large role in establishing human rights and attitudes of non-violence in Africa.

Eventually the war will be won, and Africa will no longer lose millions to AIDS, but until then, there is a lot of work to be done.