~ Le Viêt Nam, aujourd'hui. ~
The Vietnam News

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More than 50,000 HIV cases in Vietnam

HANOI - More than 50,000 Vietnamese people have the HIV virus while another 7400 have AIDS, official government figures released Wednesday said. However an official with the National Committee for AIDS Prevention, the organisation that released the data, told AFP as many as 150,000 Vietnamese suffered from HIV.

The official said most of the infected people were male and drug addicts. According to the committee's figures, there are 50,856 people with HIV cases in Vietnam, 7,418 have AIDS and 4,004 people in total have died of the virus. The chairman of the National Committee on AIDS Prevention, Professor Chung A, told AFP earlier this year that Vietnam's health ministry could only afford to treat less than 1,000 patients a year at the prices charged by Western pharamaceutical manufacturers.

Vietnam has to pay between 8,000 and 12,000 dollars a year for sufficient retroviral drugs to treat 20 to 30 patients, an impossible sum for the nation's coffers. The Health Ministry is expected to submit to the government this month a plan for domestic production of AIDS drugs.

So far, Vietnam's pharamaceutical manufacturers have produced on trial eight categories of anti-HIV/AIDS drugs. The World Trade Organisation last year weakened the drug companies' grip on patents by agreeing in principle that countries with a pharmaceutical industry could manufacture generics in the event of a national health crisis.

Agence France Presse - July 04, 2002.