MYANMAR: HIV rate going down in Myanmar, but activists still pessimistic.

Record ID: 402400

  • Title: MYANMAR: HIV rate going down in Myanmar, but activists still pessimistic.
  • Date: 3rd June 2012
  • Summary: EXTERIOR OF HOSPICE
  • Embargoed: 18th June 2012 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Myanmar
  • Country: Myanmar
  • Reuters ID: LVA7VMT0E13G419ABXXUGPRJMZ1K
  • Story Text: UNICEF reports that the HIV rate in Myanmar has been going down due to education and prevention measures, but some Myanmar activists say not enough is being done to fight the virus.
    A crowded hospice in the suburbs of Myanmar's biggest city, Yangon, is home to 182 HIV patients, whose plight demonstrates the painful limits of the nation's new democracy.
    The hospice is basic, its bamboo walls decorated with pictures of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
    Doctors pay visits, but patients cook and clean for themselves, helped by volunteers.
    A reform-minded government has vowed to overhaul a decrepit health system, but little change is likely for HIV/AIDS sufferers, who thanks to social stigma and medical neglect, are shut off in hospices that bring to mind leper colonies.
    Forty-nine year-old Man Zaw Lin Tun did not elaborate on how he got infected with HIV, but he was working in Yangon before heading back to his hometown to be a teacher when he developed symptoms.
    He has no wife or children, just his parents and a sister who remain in the village.
    His mother sometimes visits to take care of him. He is visibly thin and weak, but remains positive.
    "I didn't know that there is medication for HIV-infected people so they can live like a normal person. That's why I got depressed. But when doctors explained to me and treated me very well. Sometimes, I don't even notice that I have the virus. I have nothing on my mind. Doctors also explained to me that if you have cancer, you can't cure it no matter how much you wish to, but if you're infected with HIV, you can live a long life," said Lin Tun.
    UNICEF said though numbers had dropped it was important to continue with prevention measures and treatment to ensure numbers stay low.
    "Over the last decade or so the HIV prevalence from what we know in Myanmar has gone down because of intense efforts at HIV prevention, providing condoms, providing harm-reduction services including methadone for drug users, and as we know now, providing treatments which also helped prevent. In addition to education work, awareness-raising. Now it's important with HIV to continue to provide those prevention and treatment interventions. Otherwise, of course, there is always a possibility that HIV infection prevalence could increase," said Craig McClure, the chief of HIV/AIDs section in UNICEF.
    However the founder of the hospice, Phyu Phyu Thin, who is also one of the new MPs, disagrees.
    "In our country, it's been said for a very long time that the rate has gone down. As for people in the field like me, we often discuss that the rate is going down because people are dying off. The actual situation in our country is that healthcare is not sufficient and we are also weak in educating the public. Therefore we can prove that we have no upperhand in any way," said Phyu Phyu Thin, who founded the place in 2002.
    The government threatened to close the centre in 2010 after Health Ministry officials warned of "the possible spread of infectious disease from the patients", reported the state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper.
    But the centre, which Suu Kyi visited after her release from house arrest in 2010, remains open. A sister hospice nearby is home to another 82 HIV patients.
    Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid group, says some 85,000 HIV-infected people in Myanmar are not getting treatment because of a lack of funding, despite an increase in international engagement with the government.
    Health workers accused Myanmar's former military rulers of largely ignoring the disease when it began to spread in the 1990s, particularly among sex workers and drug users.
    Some groups predict the situation will only worsen despite more attention on AIDS and the country's nascent democracy.
    The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, is cutting funding worldwide because of a lack of donations, jeopardising a plan to provide HIV drugs to 46,500 people in Myanmar.
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