THIS year's report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the state of humanity's health concentrates on the" 3 by 5" anti-AIDS initiative that the agency, and several collaborators, announced last year. That might not sound much, given that at least 34 million people are now thought to be infected with HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, it would, in fact, be a huge leap forward. The plan is to create easy but efficient ways of delivering life-saving treatment. Obviously, pills would have to be provided in larger numbers. But drug regimens would also be simplified. Care and counselling would be delegated from doctors and nurses to paramedical" community health workers", to avoid wasting scarce skilled manpower. And there would, inevitably, be "mobilisation" of poor-country governments, charities, religious bodies, companies and United Nations agencies. Richard Feachem, the head of the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, another of the international bodies involved in combating the infection, reckons that " 3 by 5" on its own will cost $2 billion-3 billion a year.