U.S. brings hope to AIDS patients

TINH BIEN, Vietnam

When her husband fell ill with AIDS, doctors at the hospital turned him away, fearing they would catch the virus.

“They told him, ‘There’s nothing we can do for you. Just go home and wait to die,’” said Do Thi Phuong. So when she, too, got AIDS, she didn’t seek help, fearing that she would also be shunned. Instead, like her husband, she went home to die.

Then she heard about a little AIDS clinic in the Mekong Delta, in a place where the Americans used to train South Vietnamese soldiers during the Vietnam War.

Now, on a regimen of AIDS drugs provided by the U.S., she is getting her strength back.

The clinic at Tinh Bien is one of 55 across Vietnam funded by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, the initiative that President George W. Bush made a centerpiece of his administration.

As memories of the eight-year war fade, the America that older Vietnamese remember - of bombers, guns and Agent Orange - is now represented to many by places such as Tinh Bien, where 340 HIV patients are getting treatment.

The U.S. has spent more than $300 million fighting AIDS in Vietnam and is now providing AIDS drugs to more than two-thirds of the 32,000 Vietnamese receiving treatment. At $85 million this year alone, PEPFAR accounts for 80 percent of U.S. humanitarian spending in the country.

The funding pays for treatment, support for patients’ families and prevention programs and for dispelling the AIDS stigma, which is entrenched in Vietnam.

Just how entrenched was demonstrated recently when a group of HIV-positive schoolchildren living at a PEPFAR-supported compound near Ho Chi Minh City were enrolled at a neighborhood school. They were expelled the next day because parents of other students objected.

“The other kids refused to play with me,” said Huyen, 13, who wouldn’t give her last name. “They pointed at me and said, ‘She has AIDS.’ ”

Mrs. Phuong feared the stigma, too. She said that for a long time, she didn’t dare tell anyone she had HIV.

“In the countryside, the only thing people know about AIDS is that it’s the ‘disease of the century.’ They’re afraid they’ll get infected, so they shun you,” she said.

Then she saw a report on TV that life-extending AIDS drugs were available in Vietnam. But the doctors she asked didn’t know where to find them.

Finally, outreach workers learned from a friend of hers that she was ill and invited her to the Tinh Bien clinic.

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