Burma: Unpreventable Death Under Military Boots

Mon, 2008-12-01 04:18
By Zin Linn

December 1st (today) is the 21st World AIDS Day and people around the world will be celebrating and commemorating the occasion. According to UNAIDS estimates, there are now 33.2 million people living with HIV throughout the world, including 2.5 million children. During 2007 some 2.5 million people became newly infected with the virus. Around half of all people who become infected with HIV do so before they are 25 and are killed by AIDS before they are 35. Around 95% of people with HIV/AIDS live in developing nations. But HIV today is a threat to men, women and children on all continents around the world.

World AIDS Day is important in reminding people that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done. However, in Burma, HIV/AIDS activists and volunteers are being threatened and suppressed daily by the military authorities.

Maggin monastery in Rangoon’s Thingangyun Township, where HIV patients were cared for was raided in September 2007. According to witnesses, soldiers and riot police broke into the monastery and violently arrested four monks, including the abbot and four people caring for HIV patients. Then Burma’s military authorities sealed the Maggin monastery, forced to leave number of monks suspected of being supporters of the National League for Democracy led by the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as a dozen of HIV/AIDS patients who were being dwelt there.

Threatening and arresting of HIV/AIDS workers is not only disturbing for volunteers, but is also disheartening and daunting for the patients. The volunteers take on several duties, including trying to buy medicine for the patients, arranging food and temporary shelter for them and helping to have treatment in respective clinics sponsored by NGOs. They also have to take responsibilities of children of the deceased patients being send to respective orphanages.

At a press conference in Bangkok on 25 November, the international medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said Burma's military regime must act now if it wants to deal with one of Asia's most serious epidemics of HIV/AIDS. Almost 25,000 people will die this year of HIV/AIDS in Burma, unless lifesaving treatment is significantly increased, according to MSF’s latest report.

MSF said that if Burma does not get the funds it needs for antiretroviral drugs, some 24,000 people could die next year from the disease. MSF also said that in 2007 alone, AIDS-related illnesses killed 25,000 people.

According to MSF’s report, which was released on 25 November in Bangkok, the group said that an estimated 240,000 people are thought to have HIV/AIDS in military-ruled country. Of these people, 76,000 are in urgent need of antiretroviral treatment, yet less than 20 percent of them are currently able to access it.

The report – “A Preventable Fate: The Failure of ART Scale-up in Myanmar” - says Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) is providing treatment to about 11,000 patients while the military regime, the United Nations and several non-governmental groups are taking care of only some 4,000 patients.

"It is unacceptable that a single NGO is treating the big chunk of HIV patients in a crisis of this magnitude. It is unacceptable because it is wholly inadequate. We cannot meet the needs, and we therefore call upon those who can to take up this responsibility ", stated Joe Belliveau, MSF Operations Manager.

The government and international communities have provided very little to the crisis, Belliveau added.

In 2008, the junta allocated the equivalent of 0.7 cents per person on healthcare, of which about 200,000 dollars was allocated to treatment of HIV/AIDS patients. With the growing revenue from oil and gas exports, the junta must provide more in its ailing health system and specifically HIV/AIDS care and treatment, the MSF report says.

Burma (Myanmar), which faces economic sanctions in the West because of its poor human rights record, earned 2.7 billion dollars from natural gas exports to Thailand last year, according to a November 2008 issue of the Myanmar Times weekly, citing government officials.

Drugs that are not offered by aid organizations; the regime’s cost for a patient is around $29 per month. With most people in Myanmar living on an average of $1.20 per day, the cost of drugs is too expensive for the patients most of them are poor. The junta spends an estimated 0.3 per cent of its gross domestic product on health, one of the lowest rates worldwide.

The aid organization also appealed for taking part efficiently by the international community to ward off the crisis. At present, Burma receives around $3 per person in aid which may be one of the lowest rates when compared with other countries on the region. One reason for this may be that international donor groups are disinclined to offer aid to Burma, a country run by a strict military junta widely criticized for its atrocious human rights record.

An HIV/Aids project run by the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) on behalf of its detained leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been harassed time to time by the military authorities. The authorities are risking lives and increasing the dangers of the HIV epidemic in the country by preventing volunteers and foreign aid workers from giving essential aid to patients suffering from the catastrophic disease.

Looking back for a couple of year, Dr Chris Beyrer’s research team from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health carried out field investigations in Burma in 2005 and 2006, and also searched the medical and policy literature on HIV, TB, malaria, and avian flu in Burma.

The researchers found that the military junta's investment in healthcare is one of the lowest in the world and that the health sector has been weakened by common corruption. The junta or State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) has also weakened the country's laboratory infrastructure, say Beyrer and his researchers, due to disinvestment and through creating a dearth of skilled personnel.

Burma’s authoritarian military regime is widely condemned for its human rights abuses, and in August 2005 these concerns led the Global Fund to Fight HIV, TB and Malaria to withdraw its proposed $98.4 million grants to the country. The regime accustomed to prevent aid workers, journalists and diplomats from visiting temporary dwellings for HIV patients looking after by kind-hearted volunteers.

It is difficult for foreign volunteers to have secure visas to enter Burma if they are recognized in humanitarian related fields. There was an example of expelling the head of the United Nations in Burma, Mr. Charles Petrie, for drawing attention to the humanitarian catastrophe that hanging around in the country.

As the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) says in its latest report, thousands of people are needlessly dying due to a severe lack of lifesaving HIV/AIDS drugs needed for treatment in military ruled Burma. People of Burma have to bank on how the UN and the ASEAN will take into account the fate of the HIV patients in military run country as well as the report – “A Preventable Fate: The Failure of ART Scale-up in Myanmar” – by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

Zin Linn is a freelance Burmese journalist, lives in exile. He's working at the NCGUB East Office as an information director and is vice-president of Burma Media Association, which is affiliated with the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontiers.