The Secretariat of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee has just urged local relevant agencies to take bold measures in combating HIV/AIDS, local newspaper People reported Thursday.

Under the secretariat's instruction issued on Wednesday, the agencies need to step up HIV/AIDS prevention, in paralleling with beefing up fights against drug addiction and prostitution, and fostering socioeconomic development.

The instruction also stresses the importance of improving capacity of staff at both central and grassroot levels, strengthening the efficiency of inter-sectoral collaboration, reducing stigma and discrimination, encouraging local and international organizations, as well as infected people to join in preventing the disease, and completing the legal document system to facilitate HIV/AIDS prevention work.

Besides, it highlighted the necessity of increasing state investment in and calling for more international assistance for the fight against the disease, and widening propaganda on the issue to each local person, especially youths and high-risk people.

Vietnam is estimated to have some 241,000 HIV carriers, most of them men. Sixty percent of the cases contract the disease after having sex with infected prostitutes or sharing injecting syringes with infected drug addicts, according to the country's Health Ministry.

The country aims to reduce the HIV/AIDS infection rate among its 82-million population to below 0.3 percent by 2010, and keep it unchanged after 2020.

Source: Xinhua