Yeah, shocking

Meanwhile in Paris:
UNDP annual forum, hosted by the French foreign ministry. Mark Mallotch Brown, coordinator of the UNDP (and just named chief of staff for Kofi Annan) talks about the "silent Tsunamis".
Yes, the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean claimed 150.000 lives so far, but:
Every day 6000 people are killed by HIV/AIDS – and another 8.200 are infected.
Every 30 seconds an African child dies of malaria – it adds up to more than a million child deaths a year
Every hour more than a thousand children under five die from diseases linked to poverty – the equivalent death toll of two tsunamis pr. Month.

...Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it. We all know. It just churns somewhere in the background. Doesn’t make it in the news, somehow. Too dispersed, too ordinary.

For me, and appearantly to many others, the tsunami was a very clear demonstration of how humanity has become closer connected. Many of us outside the disaster area have been there as tourists, we know people there, we have the "before" pictures in our photo albums.
But clearly the One World feeling doesn’t extend everywhere. For one, sub Saharan Africa is clearly not in yet.