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Vietnam's AIDS plight -- ``tip of a shark's fin''
Subject: Vietnam's AIDS plight -- ``tip of a shark's fin''
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 3:22:58 PST
HANOI, Nov 14 (Reuter) - A United Nations health expert
warned on Thursday that 60,000 Vietnamese were likely to be
infected with the AIDS virus by the end of this year, vastly
more than official figures showing just 4,534 cases.
Jamie Uhrig of the UNAIDS office in Hanoi told Reuters that
government figures for reported infections in Vietnam were
limited by weaknesses in Hanoi's system of detection.
``These figures are meaningless as the detection work is
compiled from information from police records and death
certificates,'' he said.
``I'd call it the tip of a shark's fin,'' he said.
Uhrig added that Vietnamese medical and U.N. health
officials were expecting 22,000 new infections this year,
bringing the total number of people afflicted with the AIDS
virus to 60,000.
He said Vietnam was tackling two AIDS epidemics -- the first
among male urban drug users, and a second among women in the
western Mekong Delta connected with the sex trade across the
border in Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh.
A health worker, who declined to be identified, said that in
some communes on the Cambodian border the number of cases among
women was compatible with parts of Thailand, where the spread of
AIDS is normally thought to be more advanced.
Officials at Vietnam's National AIDS Prevention Committee
said on Thursday the number of known infections had reached
4,534 people, with a further 563 showing symptoms of full-blown
AIDS and 337 deaths from the disease.
They said nearly three-quarters of the cases were
drugs-related.
Vietnam is one of the world's poorest countries with annual
per capita income among its 75 million population of around $220.
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