Some 7,000 out of more than 20,000 registered AIDS patients in Vietnam currently benefit from free treatment programs funded by the Vietnamese government and international donors, local newspaper Youth reported Wednesday.

For the remaining over 13,000 patients, they should register for the programs and strictly follow treatment procedures, the newspaper quoted Nguyen Van Kinh, deputy head of the HIV Prevention Department under the Vietnamese Health Ministry, as saying.

Under a national HIV prevention strategy, 70 percent of HIV patients in Vietnam will access free treatment by 2010, he said, noting that the country is facing shortages of doctors, funds, medical equipment and facilities for AIDS treatment.

A number of Vietnamese people buy AIDS drugs in markets, and some others go to Cambodia or Thailand for treatment, he said. Having high HIV/AIDS infection rates, the two neighbor countries benefit from imports of low-cost AIDS medicines.

By last month, there were over 114,000 local people having HIV on file, of them more than 20,000 were AIDS patients, he said, noting that the actual respective figures are estimated at 280,000 and 59,000.

Vietnam plans to reduce the HIV/AIDS infection rate among its 83-million population to below 0.3 percent by 2010, and keep it unchanged after 2020.

Source: Xinhua