Hanoi commits to fulfilling 90-90-90 goals in HIV/AIDS prevention

The 90-90-90 goals mean that by 2020, 90% of HIV-infected people will know their infection status, 90% will receive anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs and 90% of people taking ARV drugs will have durable viral suppression.

To that end, Vice Chairman of the municipal People’s Committee Le Hong Son asked offices and districts to actively carry out action plans.

According to him, communication work on HIV/AIDS prevention is not spread yet, so people do not have sufficient awareness of preventing HIV/AIDS, while units lack coordination and action programmes.

Therefore, he asked for intensified dissemination to raise public awareness and stop discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS.

The Health Department should implement a programme of action, expand the use of methadone therapy for drug addicts and scale up HIV counselling and testing, he suggested.

Deputy head of the Health Department Hoang Duc Hanh said that as of April 30, Hanoi reported nearly 20,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, ranking second in the nation and accounting for nearly 10% of the nation’s total cases.

All districts of the city have people living with HIV, with those aged 25-49 accounting for 70% of the total.

The rates of newly-detected HIV infections via blood, sex and mother to child transmission in the first four months of this year were 36.9%, 63.1% and 0%, respectively.

As of late 2017, 67.8% of HIV-infected people knew their infection status, while 53% of HIV positive people received ARV drugs.

2017 is the 10th consecutive year that Vietnam has seen decreases in the number of newly-discovered HIV infections, the number of transmissions to full-blown AIDS and the number of AIDS-caused deaths. Each year, about 10,000 new HIV infection cases were discovered in the country, mostly transmitted via sex.