Sickening

Source : The Economist (November 11, 2000 , U.S. Edition)

WHILE the world worries about Burma's political stalemate, a deadlier crisis is brewing. Thanks to a combination of ravaging infectious diseases, an atrocious health-care system, and the military regime's refusal to admit that anything is amiss, public-health officials fear that average life expectancy is collapsing. It could fall, they say, to as low as 45 years in the next two decades or so.

The junta is in denial. It claims, for instance, that no more than 25,000 people are infected with HIV in Burma. Researchers at the World Bank, however, put the figure at over 700,000, in a population of 48m, making the country the worst of the three in Asia in which more than 1% of the population is infected. (The others are Thailand and Cambodia.) According to several studies, as any as 8% of Burma's soldiers are HIV-positive. The growing use of intravenous drugs, and the increased production of heroin and amphetamines by ethnic-minority militias, will only exacerbate the epidemic.

Not only AIDS but also malaria, anthrax and old-fashioned malnutrition are decimating the people of Burma. Along the rugged border with Thailand, home to some of the most drug-resistant strains of malaria in the world, a new epidemic of malaria and anthrax is said to have killed as many as 10,000 people since July, mostly in the north-eastern district of Maung Yawn. Military sources in the northern Thai province of Chiang Mai say that hundreds of Maung Yawn residents have been crossing into Thailand in search of anti-malaria drugs.

Since 1989, when the junta signed a peace treaty with the United Wa State Army, a militia operating among the Wa people in Maung Yawn, the central government has had little presence in the area; there are no government hospitals in the territory controlled by the militia. Even if the junta had control over Maung Yawn, it could not do much: foreign malariologists working in Burma tell of government hospitals stocked with little more than bandages and a few painkillers. Medicines are not all that is in short supply.

Despite the recent boast of Khin Nyunt, the regime's intelligence chief, that his country could export grain to other Asian states, exiles who have fled to Chiang Mai speak of famine in some outlying regions. The armed forces, which have allegedly been ordered to "live off the land", often steal food from malnourished villagers, they say. The Rangoon junta has refused to acknowledge the scope of the health crisis, calling estimates of HIV and malaria rates exaggerated. The government has launched a programme to boost literacy, which may help empower some women and thereby help slow HIV transmission, but it does not require sex or drugs education in schools.

Burma gets little help from outside. Foreign aid remains limited, thanks to the sanctions slapped on the junta by many countries after the generals refused to acknowledge Aung San Suu Kyi's victory in the 1990 general election. Pakistan and China are friendly, but they tend to supply weapons, not pills. The Thai government had vowed to set up a health task-force with Burma, but relations between the two neighbours have become strained. The militias have taken to exporting vast quantities of amphetamines to Thailand, where the government blames the Burmese regime for failing to control its new Wa friends.A public-health crisis threatens to overwhelm Burma.