Public health challenges also affect development and security.

• Position: From the Secretary-General

WE IN THE UNITED NATIONS FAMILY do know that human health is crucial to our mission for development and security around the world.

Since your institution was created, life expectancy in this country has literally doubled, largely thanks to the conquest of infectious diseases. But if some of the advances have defied what we could have imagined just a few decades ago, so too have some of the challenges. You have seen vivid evidence of that through your mission to improve the health of people, particularly disadvantaged people living in cities. The issues you confront--from health disparities to HIV/AIDS and access to care--are the same that we face, writ large, on a global scale.

Today, more than half of humankind lives in cities. That is more than 3 billion people. Nearly 1 billion, one in every six human beings is an urban slum dweller living without adequate shelter and basic services. This figure is expected to rise to 2 billion over the next 25 years. As poverty grows increasingly urban, the greatest impact will be felt in the very poorest countries. Urban poverty, in turn, creates an entry point for disease and ill health. Millions of people are homeless. The most vulnerable, including women and children, are the first victims of violence, crime, overcrowding and all the health hazards associated with inhuman living conditions in rapidly growing cities. It is in these urban killing fields that epidemics take their heaviest toll. That applies to all the biggest killers of our time--malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and HIV/AIDS.

There are at least 300 million acute cases of malaria each year, leading to more than a million deaths annually. Nine out of ten of these deaths are in Africa, mostly in young children. Malaria is Africa's leading cause of under-five mortality. It accounts for 40 per cent of the continent's already overburdened public health expenditure. Five thousand people die from TB every day. TB kills more than a million and a half every year and more than 8 million new cases are detected annually. Africa is the only continent where the number of cases continues to increase.

We cannot win against TB without progress against the disease that leaves so many defenceless against it: HIV/AIDS. The AIDS pandemic killed nearly 3 million people last year. It is taking a rising, alarming and disproportionate toll among women and young people. It continues to wreak a path of destruction, again, most severely in Africa, but it is probably the...