By Peter Mann

The latest AIDS news is terrifying. One in every 50 Black American men may be infected with HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Globally, more than 50 million people have been infected, and more than 20 million have already died.

Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, a consortium of U.N. agencies fighting the pandemic, says 36 million are currently infected.

Africa, home to only nine percent of the world's population, has two thirds of current AIDS infections, and AIDS will claim the lives of around one-third of today's 15-year-olds in Africa. Yet the greatest risk of a new AIDS explosion lies in Asia, home to 60 percent of the world's population.

Until now, almost all public responses have been to treat AIDS as a medical problem, and an issue of high-risk behavior - the sharing of infected needles by drug users, and unprotected sex within at-risk communities.

What is coming more clearly into view, as the pandemic reaches into every region of the globe, is that AIDS is more than a health crisis or a lifestyle issue. AIDS is also a crisis of poverty. Poverty spreads AIDS. And, in turn, the widening AIDS crisis increases poverty. In fact, it would be even more accurate to say that AIDS is being spread by impoverishment, by deadly patterns of development that make people poor and place at risk whole sectors of populations.

In the United States, the alarming spread of AIDS within the African-American community has been concentrated within the inner cities, targeting the poor and the addicted. People in these inner-city poor neighborhoods are marginalized, often malnourished, in poor health, and without adequate health care for prevention or treatment.

While high-risk behavior in these communities directly spreads HIV/AIDS, urban poverty is clearly a contributing cause. And as AIDS moves through these communities, they become still poorer and more marginalized.

The figures are startling. In 1999, African Americans were less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, more than 26 percent of the poor, and 37 percent of all reported cases of HIV/AIDS.

By 2000, AIDS had become in the U.S. the leading cause of death for Blacks between the ages of 25 and 44. Yet these communities reflect the realities of global poverty, where 1.2 billion people live on less than one dollar a day, lack basic health care, education, adequate food and clean water, and are increasingly marginalized - impoverished - within the global economy.

The status of women is a key indicator of vulnerability to AIDS.

Women and girls are a majority of the world's poor, and they repesent an increasing proportion of those infected by HIV/AIDS - 55 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.

Women in the developing world are often malnourished, vulnerable to infections and sexually transmitted diseases, without health care, and lacking power inside the family. Thus they are placed in a high-risk environment for AIDS.

Rural impoverishment is a root cause of labor migration in West Africa, which brings AIDS back into home communities; of commercial sex work in the cities of Thailand by which women support rural households; of professional donors in China who make a little extra money by selling their blood into an unsafe blood system.

All of these are high-risk behaviors that spread AIDS; but they are also responses to a social and economic system of development that deprives the poor of choices. Public policy decisions also deprive the p