Project to intensify anti-malaria efforts through 2017
The Prime Minister has given the green light to a project on bolstering community-based malaria prevention and control through 2017, with the backing of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The project will focus anti-malaria efforts on vulnerable groups while improving the capacity and sustainability of the national malaria prevention programme.
It aims to continue reducing malaria incidence and the malaria mortality rate, and to prevent malaria outbreaks so as to reach the targets of the national strategy on malaria prevention and eradication for 2011 – 2020.
It will be implemented in 31 provinces with a non-refundable ODA grant of over 15.1 million USD financed by the Global Fund. About 2.63 million USD of the sum is from what remained from a similar project between 2009 and 2015.
While the Vietnamese Ministry of Health will provide more than 26.2 billion VND (1.17 million USD) for the project implementation, the beneficiary provinces will have to source around 23.1 billion VND (1 million USD) from their own budget’s to carry out the work.
The number of malaria sufferers in the country reduced from 43,700 in 2012 to 27,800 in 2014, according to the Institute of Mariology Parasitology and Entomology.
However, the number of malaria cases in the southeastern and Central Highlands areas increased remarkably, by 66.59 percent and 26.11 percent respectively, over the last six months of 2015.
Vietnam targets to completely eradicate the disease by 2030.
