Vietnam appreciated in effectively preventing emerging diseases

Over the past 70 years, Vietnam has taken many strides forward in providing healthcare to people, especially in fighting dangerous diseases and preventing emerging diseases entering Vietnam, said Tran Dac Phu, Head of the Preventive Health Department under the Ministry of Health in an interview granted for Vietnam News Agency.

 

He noted that efforts towards disease prevention had witnessed particularly effective results over the past 30 years since the country had gainedreunification, remarkable progress had been recorded in sciences, socio-economic development, and people’s knowledge had been raised, with notable progress in vaccine use and production.

 

In particular, Vietnam has established a milestone in effectively and successfully inspecting, discovering, diagnosing and treating diseases. As a result, many dangerous diseases have been controlled and eliminated, including smallpox (eliminated in 1978), polio (eliminated in 2000), inborn tetanus (eliminated in 2005) and plague (eliminated in 2002). Meanwhile, some diseases, including diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, have been reduced thousands of times when vaccination has been carried out. On the other hand, diseases in danger of spreading into large outbreaks such as dengue fever, encephalitis, tuberculosis, typhoid and cholera have been controlled with limited infections and fatalities.

 

Health Minister Nguyen Thi Kim Tien and a delegation inspect the prevention of diseases at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases. (Photo: VNA)

Moreover, Vietnam has succeeded in preventing and rapidly controlling dangerous emerging global diseases. It is one of countries successfully controlling SARS, flu A/H5N1 and flu A/H1N1. It has successfully prevented an occurrence of emerging diseases such as flu A/H7N9, Ebola, Mers-CoV, making great contributions to stabilize social welfare in the context of increasingly high tourism and trade exchanges all over the world.

Regarding preventive health work, he stated that the work aimed to reduce disease infections and fatalities among communities, thus ensuring health security and social welfare, promoting sustainable economic development.

 

According to Mr. Phu, in the near future, the preventive health system will be modernized from the central to local level, making it capable of discovering and diagnosing diseases in an early and exact way, thus promptly dealing with initial cases. “Special attention will be paid to the testing ability to discover a majority of emerging or new diseases,” he said.

 

He added that the health sector would increase vaccinations, with an expansion in the number of vaccines, especially those for children and those in remote areas, forwarding the elimination of some dangerous diseases and minimizing infections and fatalities.

 

Mr. Phu went on to emphasise the importance of combining these efforts with international support and cooperation to ensure that a balance in technique, finance, equipment and human resources was available to help prevent and fight global diseases.

 

Regarding Vietnam’s role in preventing emerging diseases in the region and in the world, Mr. Phu said that Vietnam had made more and more important contributions to disease prevention, which was appreciated by international friends.