ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

By LAWI WENG | More than 1,000 Burmese migrants marked World AIDS Day on Monday in Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border by conducting a one-hour walk from Cynthia Maung’s Mae Tao Clinic to Mae Sot market to raise awareness about HIV/ AIDS within the Burmese migrant community in Mae Sot. They also distributed leaflets telling migrants how to protect themselves against the disease.

Saw Than Lwin, a supervisor at the Mae Tao clinic’s AIDS department, said that HIV/ AIDS increases every year among Burmese migrants in the region.

“We have about 1,000 HIV/ AIDS patients,” he said. “Many are migrants. We can provide only 3 percent of the necessary antiretroviral treatment (ART).”

According to a joint Asean-UN report released on Thursday, 1.5 million migrants across Southeast Asia, who are adults and of working age, are infected with HIV.

A Thai nongovernment organization (NGO), the Pattanarak Foundation, which supports HIV/AIDS patients in the Three Pagodas Pass area at the Thai-Burmese border, helped organize an event in Three Pagodas Pass to commemorate World AIDS Day on Monday, where an estimated 800 Burmese migrants participated.

The group said the number of HIV patients has doubled this year.

Meanwhile, in Burma, the state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported World AIDS Day with a commentary declaring, “Stop AIDS. Keep the Promise. Scaling [sic] up prevention, treatment and care.”

The Burmese military authorities on Monday held a meeting in Naypyidaw to discuss the current impact of AIDS in the country, according to an NGO source in Rangoon.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) published a report last week titled “A Preventable Fate” in which it said that some 25,000 people in Burma had died from AIDS-related diseases last year.

The report warned that about 30,000 Burmese with HIV/ AIDS will die in the next 12 months if those people can’t find medical support.

“Only one in four HIV/ AIDS patients are getting ART—that is 15,000 people,” said Frank Smithuis, the head of the MSF mission in Rangoon.

“MSF currently provides treatment to 11,000 of the 76,000 people who need immediate treatment,” he said.

The Burmese regime and other NGOs supply 4,000 people with ART, according to Smithuis.