From Africa to Russia, from Peru to China, mining companies face a problem: the workers who haul up the earth's riches are coming down with Aids and it is hampering operations at a time of booming demand for minerals.
"The epidemic is extremely severe. It's worse than anyof us will admit to. There are a lot of undiagnosed cases that don't get reported," says Brian Brink, medical senior vice-president at Anglo American's South African operations. He said Anglo, the world's fourth largest mining group, realised it had a problem at its mines 21 years ago when four of its 18,450 South African workers tested positive for the virus.
More than two decades later, with up to one in three infected and South Africa the centre of a global pandemic, the company says its own prevention efforts failed.
"We didn't stop this epidemic. In fact if I was to look back and score ourselves, I think we get zero," Brink said.
Worldwide, the disease has killed some 30 million people, double the amount of casualties in World War I. Miners are anxious to build on lessons learned in South Africa to try to stem the tide elsewhere.
Aids is growing fastest in Eastern Europe and Central Asia where the number of people living with HIV has grown 20-fold in less than a decade, says the United Nations.
In Russia, the infection rate has more than doubled in two years to 1.2 million in 2005 and in the country's fifth largest gold mining area, Irkutsk, the rate is more than three times the national average.
In India, there are many patches where the population's infection rate is above 1 per cent.
