This is the book I never read ~ These are the words I never said ~ This is the path I'll never tread ~ These are the dreams I'll dream instead

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

My first understanding of HIV and AIDS was like everybody else from my generation. In the mid-'80s, we heard about this, and it was terrifying, because we knew nothing about how to respond to it appropriately, and we didn't really understand about how the virus is passed. There was a lot of misconception about that.

Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.

Fundamentally, we are all in the same place: we're born, we live, and we're going to die. In between, we'll have joy and we'll have sadness.

Dying is easy, it's living that scares me to death.

Medicine comes with hope: the hope of having a healthy child, the hope of being able to raise your family.