Talking AIDS Today

It's World AIDS Day! Thirty to 40 million people have AIDS across the globe. Several million a year die from it, including hundreds of thousands of children. When we first encountered AIDS doing stories about what some called gay cancer back in the early 1980's. The disease was an automatic death sentence. AIDS was highly stigmatized. Preachers happily pronounced that gay men were dying because they deserved to. We have come some distance since then -- money, research, drugs. Fighting AIDS has become a common cause to politicians, from Bill Clinton to George Bush. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Africa where the disease is most prevalent. The Vatican deciding that condom use even under limited circumstances to prevent the spread of the disease is remarkable. Still many will die because of ignorance and prejudice. And universal access to AIDS drugs is more dream than reality.

Just a Minute...I'm Harry Smith, CBS News