The document, issued in December by the World Health Organization and the U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS, concludes that:

? 30.6 million people were infected with HIV at the end of 1997, which includes one in every 100 adults ages 15 to 49 worldwide and 1.1 million children under the age of 15.

? About 16,000 new HIV infections took place every day in 1997, for a total of 5.8 million new infections during the year.

?More than 90 percent of HIV-infected people live in developing countries, and the vast majority of these do not know they are infected.

? The number of AIDS deaths since the beginning of the epidemic totals 11.7 million. Of the 2.3 million people who died of AIDS in 1997, 46 percent were women and 20 percent were children.

? Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the fastest-moving epidemic, with two-thirds of the total world number of HIV-infected people living there.

Moreover, the worst is still to come, the report says. Treatment of HIV+ people in the developing countries is hampered because they generally lack access to the new antiretroviral drugs that can reduce the speed at which they develop AIDS. Even in developed countries, not everyone has access to the expensive new medications. And, the report cautions, the drugs aren?t a cure. They are not effective in everyone, and it is not known how long their effects will last. ?Thus, many if not most of the 30 million people currently infected may well die in the relatively near future, perhaps within the next decade,? the report asserts.

?Peter Freiberg