The Age of AIDS.

Pakistan is a country on the brink of a major AIDS epidemic, and experts say "time is of the essence" if this country of 159 million is to avoid following in the footsteps of neighboring India, which has the world's second largest number of HIV/AIDS cases.

Rising poverty, a growing number of intravenous drug users, severe social stigma, and an absence of basic sex education combine to make Pakistan particularly vulnerable. Although the recorded number of infections is under 3,000, UNAIDS believes the number to be closer to 73,000 and rising. "We are not actually diagnosing people," Dr. Asif Mirza of the Family Planning Association of Pakistan told the BBC. "... And the people who are already diagnosed, we don't look after them properly."

HIV testing remains expensive, and the cost of antiretroviral treatment, at $300 per month, is nearly twice the average person's salary. Meanwhile, the country lacks the basic central infrastructure to administer testing and treatment; health care is the responsibility of provincial governments -- and even blood donations are not universally screened for HIV.

Religion dominates every aspect of life in Pakistan, where AIDS is seen largely as divine retribution for immorality, but some non-governmental organizations have found that by working with the religious community they can promote a basic understanding of the disease and reduce its stigma. Amal, an NGO based in Islamabad, and Catholic Relief Services have operated programs in several madrassas that encourage future clerics to educate their worshipers about how the disease is spread and preach compassion for the infected by drawing on teachings from the Qu'ran. However, most Muslim clerics remain averse to teaching basic sex education -- particularly the use of condoms, which they argue promotes promiscuity.

The government of Pakistan recognizes the looming threat and has made HIV/AIDS education an optional extracurricular program in the country's high schools, but safe sex is not widely practiced here, even among the most at-risk groups. A survey of female sex workers in Karachi found that one in five cannot recognize a condom and 75 percent do not know condoms prevent HIV; one third had never even heard of AIDS. Intravenous drug users are similarly uninformed, and they account for 74 percent of known transmissions. Small, localized epidemics have already broken out among intravenous drug users in the cities of Karachi and Lakarna, where HIV infection rates are 23 percent and 10 percent respectively. For Pakistan, the time to prevent an epidemic may be running out.