We can't cure Aids, but we can try to prevent its spread

The latest Unicef report on HIV/ Aids presents a frightening vision for the world. According to the agency, more than 40 million people worldwide have Aids, and it will kill 70 million people over the next 20 years unless the rich nations of the world step up their efforts to curb the disease. The young already account for around half of new cases of HIV around the world. Some 6,000 young people become infected each day.

The economic, social and political consequences of this epidemic are already proving catastrophic in parts of Africa. Quite apart from the vast scale of the human tragedy, the deaths of parents, often in the prime of their lives, have left children to fend for themselves and placed a terrible burden on developing nations. Indeed, that burden is made still more difficult to bear when Aids cuts a swath through the youngest and most productive section of a nation's workforce; more than 2 million, mostly young, Africans died from it last year. In Zimbabwe, which is already in a precarious enough position, Aids infects a third of the population. Such has been the effect of this scourge in Africa.

The Unicef report serves to remind us, however, that while Africa has been particularly badly affected by the disease, Aids is a truly global phenomenon and is now spreading rapidly in eastern Europe and east Asia.

So what is to be done? It is hard to dispute Unicef's conclusion that Western nations must export to the developing and emerging world the sort of measures that have already been at least partially successful in wealthy societies. That means funding for antiretroviral drugs as well as pressure on the pharmaceutical companies to relax their patents and agree a fair price for these treatments. It means funding and practical help with health education programmes – and here leaders such as Thabo Mbeki, of South Africa, must be lobbied and persuaded about the scale of the danger they face.

And it means spending of perhaps $7bn to $10bn a year; this may sound a lot, but it is well within the means of the richest nations on the planet. What's more, it is a small price to pay to save so many young lives.