STWR - Share The World's Resources

This year's World AIDS Day sees health watchdogs battling against complacency, warning that AIDS still kills some 6,000 people each day even if the estimated toll of infections has fallen and life-saving drugs are being rolled out.

Drive to improve sanitation is the key to educational and economic progress.

Lying back in a hospital ward, the procedure done and successful, a cup of tea going down nicely with the last of the morphine, you are a spectator to the best. By the best, I mean a glimpse of society with none of the dogmatic histrionics of a media and political class determined to change the way we think. That is the worst. By the best I mean, unforgettably, the spectacle of the miners of Murton, County Durham, emerging from the mist of a cold March morning, with the women marching first, going back to the pit. No matter their defeat by superior forces, they were the best.

No bathroom. No clean water to drink. No playground for kids except streets filled with filth and human waste. That is the picture of life for the world's 2 billion poorest -- a vast majority of whom are working in big cities of developing countries -- painted by an international summit recently concluded in India.

The roots of America's shocking health statistics lie in social inequality, poverty and the healthcare system itself. But there is a road from here to the good society.

Despite its enormous wealth and highly advanced technology, the United States lags far behind other industrialised countries -- and even some developing ones -- in providing adequate health care to women during pregnancy and childbirth.

Thanks to global warming, pollution, population growth, and privatization, we are teetering on the edge of a global crisis.