HCM City does well in combating HIV ‘but more effort needed'

HCM City has achieved great success in combating HIV/AIDS in the two decades since it reported the country\'s first case, but more efforts are needed, a health official said.

Speaking at the opening of a photo exhibition depicting the fight against HIV at the Youth Cultural House on Saturday, Dr Le Truong Giang, deputy head of the HCM City AIDS Committee, hailed the efforts to protect people from the disease.

Giang, who is also deputy head of the city Department of Health, said that in 1995 WHO had warned there would be 200,000 people with HIV in HCM City in 2000. "But now, a decade later, the city only has around 40,000 patients and around 8,000 people have died since 2000," Giang said.

"After 20 years of combating the disease non-stop, we have achieved great success in preventing its spread in the wider community," he said.

The city has a programme to prevent HIV transmission from mothers to their unborn children. "In Vietnam only in HCM City is it successful, with 150 children saved each year," he said.

The free anti-retroviral treatment offered to every HIV/AIDS patient has also been very successful, helping save an estimated 10,000 patients from possible death, according to Giang.

In the early days of the epidemic, the fatality rate was pretty high, with 2,000 people dying as recently as five years ago. But the number has now fallen to 600 a year.

Though the rate of infection among drug users and sex workers peaked in 2001 and 2002 at 80 per cent and 25 per cent respectively, Giang admitted that drug use and prostitution remained a problem, with drug users appearing to get younger.

HIV transmission between men who have sex with men was becoming a great concern and this group would be the focus of the city\'s upcoming campaign, he said.

The Ministry of Health\'s HIV/AIDS Prevention Department announced recently that more than 9,000 new cases were detected in the first nine months this year.

Men, mostly aged between 20 and 39, accounted for 70 per cent of the patients. HCM City had the largest number with 1,345.