Palm Beach Post

It was 1982 when Dr. Jean Malecki examined a dying 9-month-old baby and made the first pediatric AIDS diagnosis in Palm Beach County.

The parents, who had arrived recently from the Caribbean, were sick, too.

"Within six months, the child had died," Malecki said. "The whole family got wiped out by the disease."

Malecki states this flatly because in the past 25 years, the Palm Beach County health director says, she has seen that flinching from the truth accomplishes nothing.

Australia's needle exchange program aims to prevent injecting drug users from sharing dirty needles.

These are good times in this embattled capital.

Kidnappings are down and trash is picked up.

Brightly-painted trucks that serve as buses drive through bustling streets where vendors supply cheap wares and workers repair ancient machines with obsolete tools.

United Nations trucks patrol the streets, too, but after years of outside intervention, the people of this impoverished republic are running their own government.

CANGE, Haiti — Trucks teeter perilously as they climb the rutted and rock-strewn road between Port-au- Prince and Cange, jolting the people who travel unsheltered on their cargo.

Under the best conditions, it is a three-hour journey of lurching, halting and downpours.

It was an especially hard trek for a frail and feverish 35-year-old woman named Benita, who was put atop a truck one day in August after seven months of growing weaker while the pain in her belly grew stronger.

Experts at the International AIDS Society Conference discuss the future of treating and preventing the HIV virus.

Sex workers in the Dominican Republic fight against the growing rate of HIV and AIDS among them through vaccine trials and sex education.