More than half of Hanoi prostitutes HIV positive
HANOI - More than half of registered prostitutes in the
Vietnamese capital now
carry the AIDS virus following a huge surge of
infection in the
communist state's large sex industry, a government
survey suggested
Wednesday.
Infection rates at the capital's Social Support Centre
Number Two, a
home for women with repeat convictions for
solliciting, reached 55.4
percent in 2001 against 39.2 percent the previous
year, the labour and
social affairs ministry survey showed.
The infection rates for Hanoi were even higher than
those for Ho Chi
Minh City, normally regarded as the country's vice
centre, the survey
results carried by the police daily Cong An Nhan Dan
(People's Police)
suggested. In the commercial capital's Thu Duc Women's
Education
Centre, the survey found that 24 percent of
prostitutes were HIV
positive against 21 percent at the 05 Centre in the
northern port city
of Haiphong.
Across Vietnam's big cities infection rates among
registered
prostitutes saw an increase of 18.4 percent on 2000.
The survey results seemed to contradict suggestions by
some aid
workers that intravenous drugs use remained the
primary means of
transmission of the AIDS virus in Vietnam, even among
prostitutes.
Prostitutes who were also heroin users accounted for
just 11.3 percent
of the HIV infections in Hanoi, although the
proportion rose to 18
percent in Ho Chi Minh City.
The figures were the latest in a series of surveys to
suggest an
explosion of HIV infection in Vietnam's sex and
hospitality industry.
A nationwide study published by the labour and social
affairs ministry
in March last year found that infection among
prostitutes had leapt
from 2.8 percent in 1998 to 21.6 percent in 2000.
Western donors have expressed mounting alarm about the
potential for
HIV infection to spread from prostitutes into the
general population
and Washington announced six millions dollars in
assistance for AIDS
prevention here in November 2000.
Agence France Presse - March 13, 2002.
Vietnam police demand compulsory detox for heroin users
HANOI - Vietnam's public security ministry has called on the big cities of
Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to make detoxification compulsory for all
registered heroin users, officials said Wednesday.
The ministry urged the two cities to sharply increase the number of
spaces available in detoxification centres to accommodate the
resulting rise in referrals, an official from the ministry's social
evils department told AFP. But it offered no central government
money
for the building programme which will have to be financed entirely
from municipal revenues.
The ministry also called for a new detoxification centre to be built
in the north-central province of Nghe An, considered a major entry
point for opiates smuggled from neighbouring Laos and the other
"Golden Triangle" poppy-growing countries of Myanmar and Thailand
beyond.
The ready availability of cheap heroin has led to an explosion of
intravenous drugs use in Vietnam's big cities in recent years,
seriously complicating the government's efforts to control the
spread
of AIDS.
The surge in the number of addicts, which officially reached 180,000
in 2000, has overwhelmed the government's meagre resources, sparking
widespread overcrowding and abuses in detoxification centres.
In 2000, hundreds of recovering addicts staged a mass breakout from
a
Ho Chi Minh City detoxification centre in protest at overcrowding,
while last year staff of a private clinic were suspended after a
series of suspicious deaths.
Agence France Presse - March 13, 2002.
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