President Bush is due to announce today that Vietnam will become the fifteenth country to receive support from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the sole Asian recipient of US funds.
The PEPFAR initiative is designed to channel money for HIV prevention, treatment and care to 15 seriously affected countries and bring 2 million people onto antiretroviral treatment by 2008. The US expects to fund treatment for 200,000 people by the end of the first year of PEPFAR operations, a spokesman for the programme said yesterday.
Vietnam has been chosen in preference to India, an administration spokesman said yesterday, because its epidemic has greater potential for explosive increase than any other in Asia, and because India’s economic strength makes it better able to tackle HIV on its own.
Cambodia was also rejected because the country was judged to have made good progress in controlling the spread of HIV with other sources of funding.
“The reason that we chose Vietnam is that Vietnam is the place where we believe we can address our money and our attention and really make the greatest impact,” an administration spokesman said. “And it's very timely because the epidemic in Vietnam is about to go more broadly into the general population, whereas it has been concentrated largely among commercial sex workers and intravenous drug users.”
The administration cites projections suggesting that Vietnam could have 1 million HIV infections by 2010 – an eight-fold increase – and far greater epidemic growth than other countries in the region.
Vietnam’s commitment to fighting AIDS was also noted by the United States; whilst India spends $6 per person infected with HIV treating and preventing the disease, Vietnam is currently spending $36 per person.
US funding to Vietnam in the first year will amount to around $10 million.