A MAJOR aid initiative, backed by the Government here, has helped to identify an unusually high rate of hepatitis B infection in Vietnam. The research programme has also established that HIV infection in the southeast Asian country has yet to spread significantly to the wider population.
The state-of-the-art diagnostic facility, developed by the Ireland-Vietnam Blood-Borne Virus Initiative (IVVI), will be formally opened at the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE) in Hanoi on St Patrick’s Day by junior minister Conor Lenihan.
Co-funded by a public private partnership between Atlantic Philanthropies and Irish Aid, the €5 million project began in 2007 and will be completed in 2011.
The project is the brainchild of Prof William Hall, professor of virology at University College Dublin, who is its director, with Prof Nguyen Tran Hien of NIHE.
“The IVVI programme has been designed to increase capacity and infrastructure in viral diagnostics in Vietnam. The focus of the programme is on blood-borne viruses which include HIV, and hepatitis B and C. However, it is anticipated that once completed this will allow the development of capacity to rapidly respond to all viral diseases,” Prof Hall told The Irish Times.
Now in its third year, the project is gathering blood specimens and demographic information from different parts of Vietnam.
It is focusing on people thought to be in “at-risk” groups, such as commercial sex workers (CSWs), intravenous drug users (IVDUs) and dialysis patients.
Results so far show a very high prevalence of blood-borne viral infections in northern Vietnam. More than 35 per cent of IVDUs and CSWs in Hanoi tested positive for the Aids virus. However, there is little transmission of HIV in the general population. But a total of 10.3 per cent of specimens were positive for hepatitis B, which “demonstrates extraordinarily high levels of active infection in the general population”, Prof Hall said.