If you visit Time Magazine's Internet site, scan the main menu on the left side of the screen until you come to "Special Features." Click on "AIDS in Africa." A photo essay will appear, headlined by the starkly sobering graphic of a red chronometer. The numbers change every 25 seconds, marking the infection of another African with HIV. The clock reads over 25,500,000.

World News and Prophecy and The Good News have reported regularly about the havoc wreaked by AIDS in Africa. Time has found a way to dramatize the horrible reality of the dimensions of this tragedy in a way that words alone cannot accomplish.

Once thought to be on the way to controlling AIDS, the U.S. population has reason for increased concern. A group of scientists and researchers working with the disease were confronted recently at a conference in California with statistical proof that HIV-infected people are spreading the disease with careless abandon.

A series of studies of a variety of groups, including homosexuals and heterosexuals, showed that a majority did not reveal their infection status to sex partners. Prevention programs, touted as reason to believe that the threat of AIDS had peaked in the United States, are not reaching HIV-infected people.

Sexual sin, says the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:18, harms the body, in addition to the ultimate penalty sin garners. Dr. George Lamp, director of the Universitywide AIDS Research Program, related that HIV-infected people are receiving medication, but no one helps them with "the psycho-social and relationship issues."

If people had ears to hear what God reveals in the Bible, they would find the help they need. He reveals the behavior that helps produce and maintain healthy minds and bodies: any sexual relationship outside of that supreme expression of love between a husband and wife is sin. God condemns sin in hope of motivating the sinner to stop the wrong behavior, and He offers forgiveness for the past to those who do. Thereby, we have an accepting, loving environment with realistic boundaries that would enhance and enrich the lives of those who follow the program.

As it is, many people seem to want to take their chances that medical breakthroughs might push back the boundaries of disease that naturally result from wrong behavior. It's a reckless choice.

From the earliest treatment programs, HIV mutated within infected people and resisted medications. Those mutations have now begun to be passed on from person to person-no longer developing only within the HIV-infected. "Between 1995 and 1998, less than 4 percent of the patients caught [the] resistant virus. In 1999 and 2000, this rose to 14 percent" ("Drug-Resistant AIDS Virus Spreading" by Daniel Q. Haney, AP, February 8, 2001, emphasis added).

Because many gamble that HIV is treatable, they recklessly engage in what we will politely refer to as "high-risk sexual behavior." The result is not only an increase in HIV infections, but also in another sexually transmissible disease that many thought was controlled-syphilis.

Because of these alarming trends in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has "recommended a search for new, innovative ways to get the safe-sex message to gay and bisexual men in large cities" ("Alarm Over Calif. Syphilis Outbreak" by Erin McClam, AP, February 22, 2001).

We have a suggestion for the CDC: Pass around the good news that our Creator issued an instruction manual (the Bible). If people would live by it, they would avoid the immeasurable pain and financial penalties their present choices are bringing on themselves and others.

Additional source: Sacramento Bee.