Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has given a nod to a HIV/AIDS prevention project with an estimated cost of VND1.59 trillion to strengthen capabilities of provincial and municipal authorities, the Hanoi Moi newspaper reported Nov 25, citing a source from the health ministry. Of the total, VND1.06 trillion comes from the state budget and VND526 billion from local budgets. The remaining sum will be mobilized from ODA capitals and other international aid sources. The project aims to build and upgrade 100% of HIV/AIDS prevention centers in provinces and cities by 2015. It targets 65% of these centers’ staff and workers to be university and post-university graduates and 100% of them to be trained professionally by that year. The project’s first phase, slated between 2010 and 2011, will cost VND631 billion. Jan Beagle, deputy director of the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) affirmed Vietnam has made achievements in preventing the spread of the deadly disease among drug users and raised public awareness of reducing discrimination against them.
The UNAIDS official made the comment at her meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Truong Vinh Trong in Hanoi on Nov 24. By late March this year, Vietnam identified 144,483 HIV-infected people including 30,996 AIDS developers and 42,477 deaths of the disease, said the health ministry. The ministry, however, affirmed the statistics was much lower than the real figure and forecast the number of people with HIV/AIDS will be 240,000 by late 2009.
