Santo Domingo.- The United States Government will provide 75 million dollars to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS in Dominican Republic through the Pepfar project, expected to be ready by mid September.

The funds will be used to train medical personnel to treat AIDS patients and educate vulnerable groups such as the population along the border, poor women and migrants.

“The flow of that (migrant) population creates the conditions of vulnerability towards HIV,” said David Losk, of the U.S President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar).

While Dominican Republic’s population with the AIDS virus is barely 1%, neighboring Haiti is among the hemisphere’s countries most affected by the epidemic, Losk said to the AP.

And while the women with fewer than four years of formal education are 8% of the population, they account for 25% of the people who live with AIDS in the country.

Migrants form the group which need the most attention because while in the Dominican population of around 9.8 million less than 1% has been diagnosed with the virus, neighboring Haiti is one of the countries with the highest prevalence of contagion in the continent.

Although exact figures aren’t available on the Haitian migrant population in Dominican Republic, Pepfar considers that immigrants and residents in impoverished sugar cane zones, many of Haitian ancestry, contribute to the spread of the virus in a higher proportion.

Dominican Immigration director Sigfrido Pared recently affirmed that after the January 12 quake the Haitian population in his country -estimated at around 600, 000- jumped 15%.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also considered “discrimination against people who live with HIV-AIDS (in Dominican Republic) continues being a problem,” a factor to launch a campaign related to the public health problem.