under lockdown; such a strategy may carry with it considerable social and economic costs. Current pandemics HIV/AIDS Although the WHO uses the term "global epidemic" to describe HIV (), as HIV is no longer an uncontrollable outbreak outside of Africa, some authors use the term "pandemic". HIV originated in Africa, and spread to the United States via Haiti between 1966 and 1972. AIDS is currently a pandemic in Africa, with infection rates as high as 25% in some regions of southern and eastern Africa. In 2006, the HIV prevalence among pregnant women in South Africa was 29%. Effective education about safer sexual practices and bloodborne infection precautions training have helped to slow down infection rates in several African countries sponsoring national education programs. There were an estimated 1.5 million new infections of HIV/AIDS in 2020. there have been about a total of 32.7 million deaths related to HIV/AIDS since the epidemic started. COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2, a new strain of coronavirus, was first detected in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, in December 2019. It caused a pandemic of cases of an acute respiratory disease, which is referred to as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). More than 200 countries and territories have been affected by COVID-19, with major outbreaks occurring in Brazil, Russia, India, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Western Europe, and the United States. On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization characterized the spread of COVID-19 as a pandemic, marking the first global pandemic since the 2009 swine flu pandemic. As of 31 January 2023, the number of people infected with COVID-19 has reached more than 670 million worldwide. The current death toll is 6,831,146. It is believed that these figures underestimate true totals as testing did not commence in the initial stages of the outbreak and many people infected by the virus have no or only mild symptoms so may not have been tested. Similarly, the number of deaths may also be understated as fatalities may have not been tested or are attributed to other conditions. This was especially the case in large urban areas where a non-trivial number of patients died while in their private residences. Major outbreaks in countries Notable outbreaks Plague In human history, it is generally zoonoses such as influenza and tuberculosis which constitute most of the widespread outbreaks, resulting from the domestication of animals. There have been many particularly significant epidemics that deserve mention above