Vietnam sees fall in HIV cases

HANOI: The Southeast Asian nation has registered declining trend in the count of HIV cases in the past few years, said the Ministry of Health's Viet Nam Administration of HIV/AIDS Control.

As per the available data, during 2011, almost 14,200 people have been tested positive for HIV, seeing fall by 150 as against to 2010.
Le Hai Son, Deputy Head of the administration's Supervision and Evaluation Division, said, “The decreasing rate gets slower because the number of prostitutes using condoms tends to go down while that of heroin addicts sharing injection needles went up despite the police and community efforts.”

In the country's capital, 22% of the prostitutes tested positive for HIV, but just 24.5% of them have been using condoms on regular basis. Also, over 20% of the heroin addicts in cities and provinces, who have been sharing injection needles, were infected.

Almost 200,000 people in Vietnam were suffering from HIV by the end of March 2012.

Reports suggest that over 49,300 of them have been presently got AIDS and over 52,600 have died due to the disease.