BANGKOK, Nov 25 (Reuters AlertNet) - Up to 25,000 people in Myanmar may die from HIV/AIDS next year due to a shortage of lifesaving drugs and lack of investment in the country's crumbling health care system, Medecins Sans Frontieres said on Tuesday.
Frank Smithuis, head of the NGO's mission in the former Burma, urged the government and international community to stop needless deaths in "one of Asia's worst HIV crises".
"There is no reason not to help Myanmar people who need life saving antiretroviral treatment," Smithuis told a news conference in Bangkok.
"We have to scale up rapidly and it should be supported by the Myanmar government and the international community," he said in releasing a new report on the country's HIV/AIDS crisis.
MSF said it treats 80 percent of the 15,000 people who have access to antiretroviral treatment (ART) in Myanmar. It estimated 76,000 people need treatment, representing a coverage rate of only 20 percent, one of the lowest in the world.
"In Myanmar, the government health system cannot take up that many patients," Smithuis said. "They get very little international aid, and the Myanmar government is also spending little money on health".
Myanmar received $2.90 per capita in overseas development aid in 2005, compared with $23 for Vietnam and nearly $50 for Laos.
Myanmar has faced political and economic isolation since the military refused to accept the results of a democratic election in 1990, won by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy.
Foreign donors remain reluctant to help due to the country's lack of political reforms and its dismal human rights record.
Another factor is the military government's paltry spending on health care - just $0.70 per person in 2007, a fraction of the millions of dollars the junta is believed to spend on defence.
MSF said humanitarian help should take precedence over other issues, especially when help reaches the people directly.
Until the end of 2007, MSF said it had accepted unlimited numbers of patients at its 23 clinics in five regions of the country of 53 million.
But the MSF report said the organisation "can no longer continue to scale up ART provision, in the face of so little response by other actors."
It added: "With few options to refer new patients for treatment elsewhere, the situation is dire."
The thousands of people unable to access free treatment from MSF or other agencies are forced to rely on private pharmacies, where monthly costs for the most commonly used treatments hover around $30, an unaffordable luxury in a country where most people live on little more than a dollar a day.
UNAIDS estimates there are 240,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in Myanmar, most of whom were infected through unprotected sex and intravenous drug use.
(Reporting by Reuters Bangkok Newsroom)
Children hold comic strips made by them as they take part in an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign outside a railway station in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata November 25, 2008. REUTERS/Parth ...
