Monitoring Of Viral Load In Decentralised Area in Vietnam

As of today, HIV-infected patients followed in decentralized area have little or even no access to viral load monitoring because laboratories able to perform this biological measurement are only in large cities, and because plasma transfer to these laboratories is complex and very costly. Blood sampling using dried blood spots (DBS) could overcome these difficulties. The goal of this operational research is to document the feasibility of DBS use in decentralised area to monitor viral load, to evaluate the virological response on ART, and to compare the virological response between injecting drug users (IDU) and the other patients, as IDU represent a large proportion of HIV-infected patients who may have a lower access/adherence to care.