If current rates of progress (those between 1990 and 2005) are steadily maintained, average world child mortality rates would dip below 10 per 1,000 live births in 60 years or so, around 2065. At this point, the whole world would enjoy child mortality rates almost as low as those currently experienced by industrialized countries – whose average rate is presently 6 per 1,000 live births, compared with 87 in the developing world and 155 in the least developed countries. But the soaring child mortality rates in southern Africa since 1990 as a result of HIV/AIDS – impossible to have foreseen or even imagined in 1980 – demonstrate that the reduction of child mortality is unlikely to take so straight a path.