By Sabitri Ghosh

1. HIV/AIDS
Worldwide, 40 million people suffer from HIV/AIDS, and each day approximately 8,500 of them die. More than half of all AIDS sufferers live in Africa, where cultural attitudes play a major role in the spread of the disease. Poverty and low social status force many African women and girls to trade sex for basic necessities, putting them at grave risk of infection. At the same time, the stigma of HIV/AIDS prevents sufferers from getting tested or from disclosing their HIV-positive status. And while anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) have helped improve the quality of life for people with HIV/AIDS, the treatment remains expensive and hard to come by in many developing countries.

World Vision's HIV/AIDS program, the Hope Initiative, addresses these complex issues through preventative education and advocacy, while also providing support to children orphaned by HIV/AIDS and medical care for people with the disease.

2. MALARIA
Each month, more than 106,000 people die of malaria, most of them children and pregnant women living in the developing world. Yet nobody needs to die from this preventable, mosquito-borne disease. Bed nets could save at least 500,000 children each year, according to the World Health Organization, and even more lives would be spared if anti-malarial pills were cheaper and more widely available in developing countries.

Globally, World Vision works to stop malaria by providing insecticide-treated bed nets and preventative treatment at its clinics.

3. SUDAN AND UGANDA
At the end of 2004, the Sudanese government announced that a peace agreement had been reached with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement in the country's south, ending a 21-year civil war. Observers hoped the agreement might also lead to peace in bordering Uganda, where insurgents kidnap children and force them to wage war against the government, and in the Darfur region of western Sudan, where militias continue to target rival tribes. But early this year, fighting resumed in Uganda and a new series of attacks in Darfur left thousands dead and displaced.

In the midst of the conflict, World Vision is providing malnourished refugees and internally displaced people in northern Uganda and in Darfur with food, water, and medical care. In Uganda, staff attends to the physical and emotional needs of former child soldiers. World Vision is also trying to restore stability in southern Sudan through reconstruction and peace-building initiatives.

4. TUBERCULOSIS
Each year, 1.6 million people die of tuberculosis (TB), an illness of the respiratory system that is spread by coughing and sneezing. In the developing world, TB has formed a deadly tandem with HIV/AIDS. HIV weakens people's immune systems; TB claims their lives. Experts believe that nearly half of all people with HIV/AIDS now suffer from TB.

World Vision offers testing for people living in communities at risk of TB. When a TB patient is treated early, he or she can be cured—and prevented from spreading the disease to others.

5. HAITI
A series of calamities rocked Haiti in 2004. In February, riots overthrew president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and in October, Tropical Storm Jeanne killed more than 2,000 people and left thousands of others homeless and destitute. As a result, living conditions for Haitians—already the poorest people in the Western hemisphere—are steadily worsening.

World Vision has been helping Haitians through these recent hardships with emergency assistance and agricultural recovery programs.

6. LOCUST INVASION IN WEST AFRICA
Gigantic swarms of locusts zigzagged their way across West Africa in 2004, devouring crops and grazing lands in Mauritania, Niger, and neighbouring countries. The invasion has caused dangerous food shortages and crippled the agriculture-based economies. Experts predict the locusts will return this spring.

In response, World Vision is providing families with emergency food aid, delivering new seeds and tools to farmers, and helping communities improve locust control to prevent another invasion from happening this year.

7. THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
Since 1999, a brutal civil war has been devastating the Democratic Republic of Congo, crippling its infrastructure and uprooting its people. Though hostilities officially ended in 2003, the country remains volatile, with militias still operating and people continuing to die at a rate of about 1,000 per day. To date, four million Congolese have perished. Most of the dead aren't victims of violence but internally displaced people who succumb to disease and starvation while hiding in the jungle or living in squalid camps. Over half of them are children under 5.

World Vision has been working directly with displaced Congolese to ensure they have food, clean water, medical care, and other basic necessities.