Posted on February 17, 2014
Source: The Irrawaddy
For decades, Myanmar’s struggle against HIV/AIDS was held back by the former junta’s reluctance to acknowledge the scale of the crisis facing the country. As a leading expert on the disease since the 1990s, Dr. Chris Beyrer of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in the US city of Baltimore, has long been at the forefront of efforts raise the alarm in Myanmar, which he warned in 2005 faced an explosion of HIV comparable to that of the worst-hit parts of Africa.
Dr. Beyrer recently spoke with The Irrawaddy’s Marwaan Macan-Markar about the current state of Myanmar’s HIV crisis in the wake of recent political reforms. Although many things have improved, he says, the country still has vast unmet health-care needs, with 220,000 people living with HIV and only around half of the estimated 120,000 patients requiring anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy receiving it—and most of those in Yangon and Mandalay, the two largest cities.
Still, says Dr. Beyrer, the country’s newfound openness could have a dramatic impact on how well it can contain the spread of the deadly disease. But, he adds, much remains to be learned about how deeply rural regions have been affected by decades of neglect.
