Earlier in the week I recorded an interview with Dr Khin Neyin Chan from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). She was in Canberra to present the organisation’s recent report, Lives in the balance: The urgent need for HIV and TB treatment in Myanmar. In this short interview we discuss the work undertaken by MSF inside the country, with special attention to HIV and Tuberculosis treatment programs. A podcast version of the interview should be available shortly.
Book Reviews
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Review of Misalliance
17 May 2013 1:00 PM | No CommentsKeith Weller Taylor argues that this new book is thoughtful, lucid, original, analytical, and readable
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Review of Thailand’s Hidden Workforce
05 April 2013 9:15 AM | 1 CommentInga Gruß reviews a book about the work conditions of Myanmar migrant workers in Thailand at this time of immense change.
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Review of Gender, Emotions and Labour Markets
21 February 2013 9:10 AM | 1 CommentSri Ranjani Mei Hua reviews a book dealing with experiences of women in Southeast Asia.
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Review of Authority of Influence
06 January 2013 5:31 AM | 3 CommentsScholarly treatments of gender in Myanmar, past or present, remain scarce. Jessica Harriden’s book thus fills a gap in our understanding of an important and controversial topic.
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Review of The King in Exile
04 December 2012 8:35 AM | 4 CommentsDonald M. Seekins argues that this book is the story of a dynasty that belongs truly to Burma’s past.
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Review of Buddhist Fury
13 November 2012 7:57 AM | 21 CommentsThis book explores the relationship between religion and violence in far southern Thailand, where Buddhist monks are a marginalized local minority.
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Review of Revisiting Rural Places
30 October 2012 7:54 AM | 2 CommentsRevisiting Rural Places should become an essential reference text for researchers who work on social, cultural, political and economic change in Asia.
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Review of The Institutional Imperative
16 October 2012 7:00 AM | 9 CommentsDe-agrarianisation often isn’t very pretty, but economic disparity may well be the price to be paid for pursuing it as slowly as Thailand has over the past 50 years.
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Review of Imagining Gay Paradise
09 October 2012 6:55 AM | 2 CommentsThe creation of make-shift, idiosyncratic queer paradises provides shelter, community, and belonging for many who have refused to fit into standard narratives of Southeast Asia.
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Review of The Fate of Rural Hell
12 September 2012 7:56 AM | 6 CommentsThe models of eroticism and faith in the Hell Garden have been left behind by the robust urban bourgeois consumerist culture increasingly prominent across contemporary Thai society.
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Review of Revolution Interrupted
24 July 2012 11:46 AM | 6 CommentsQuestioning received notions of revolution, this book offers a passionate and rigorous reconsideration of the period in Thailand between October 1973 and October 1976.
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Review of Land and Loyalty
17 July 2012 9:18 AM | 9 Comments
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Review of The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk
11 July 2012 3:44 PM | 9 Comments
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Review of Saying the Unsayable
19 June 2012 6:27 AM | 19 Comments
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Review of Economic Disparity and of Economic Transition
17 May 2012 8:05 AM | 2 Comments
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I was shocked when Thailand forced MSF to abandon its work here in country.
It seems incredably short sighted in that a health problem in Burma or Thaiand will not respect an arbitrary border line drawn by politicians in Yangoon or Bangkok and all on the ground all observers agree that the border is porous and that large numbers of workers, traders, and smugglers cross it at will. This makes it in everybodys interest to support the work of NGOs and especially MSF who work on these margins.
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Sterling work KNC and MSF are doing. It’s never enough of course given the limited resources.
It’s not just high profile maladies such as HIV AIDS and TB, infectious diseases still dominate Burma’s health problems closely intertwined with malnutrition and poor sanitation. Poor health education compounds the issue, and increasingly commercialized medicine which increasing numbers of medical graduates gravitate to (for want of a proper state provision for an adequately funded health system with good support and proper remuneration for doctors) in the brave new open market system falls foul of most ordinary folk who can ill afford any kind of health care let alone specialist health care.
Medical ethics has been defeated by commercialism and self preservation/self interest . The devil, or rather the grim reaper, takes the hindmost i.e. the poor. Don’t you dare fall ill in the ‘new Myanmar’.
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MSF is a better NGO than most others.
The definitive solutions require unequivocal concerted effort to improve Education, Health Care and Economic well being of country like Myanmar.
Care of HIV is the least of the health Care priority in Myanmar.
Will continue to be so 2º to the economic even if Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the West continue to use this as a Litmus Test to progress.
MSF band aiding the larger problems created by the West vs SPDC such as treatment for HIV is overshadow by the others more common yet pressing ailments mentioned repeatedly by Dr Khin Nyein Chan.
There are more victims of malaria, TB, malnutrition and other condition that the westerners take for granted within Myanmar that make the concern for plight of the HIV infected a bad joke.
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http://www.msf.org/msf/articles/2012/02/lives-in-the-balance-the-urgent-need-for-hiv-and-tb-treatment-in-myanmar.cfm
There are more incidence of hemi-pareses 2º to Stroke (CVA) then incidence of HIV.
The former 2º to hypertension, innocent victims of poverty/salty traditional diet while the latter especially women and children, the innocent victims of philandering spouses. All 2º to lack of education and poverty.
The 5 years mortality/morbidity of CVA in Myanmar is as unglamorous as HIV infected if not worst.
MSF and DASSK insistent on HIV as the face of Myanmar deficiency in healthcare reveal how both ignore the common factors of the lack of education and abject poverty which the latter party help to bring about so willingly while denying the obvious repeatedly.
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plan B,
Couldn’t agree more that getting the balance right is crucial.
I guess the reasons TB and HIV enjoy the high profile that they do are probably:
a. being infections that respond to specific therapy, so it’s pretty straightforward, and
b. contagious with the attendant risk of spreading to the developed world especially drug resistant TB. Antimalarials and yellow fever vaccine were developed in order to protect their own troops always fighting foreign wars throughout history. Looking out for number happens to be a time honoured principle.
Like the missionaries in the olden days, Western NGOs are perhaps the ‘great white saviours’ of postmodern times, at least some of them, in their ‘missionary zeal’ as well as in their patronising attitude and meddling that may or may not be closely linked to their donor states. It’s a difficult balancing act on the part of the recipient states of such aid. The IMF is the financial and hence a fundamentally more dictatorial and deadlier body than these INGOs. The old caveat ‘buyer beware’ definitely applies in both arenas.
Can beggars be choosers though since we are not exactly buyers albeit definitely debtors? I can still remember the sense of both great sympathy for and shame on behalf of the locals felt in Burma during the Biafran war and famine crisis witnessed in the news that went round the globe.
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“Can beggars be choosers though since we are not exactly buyers albeit definitely debtors?”
The likely hood of AID and TB spreading from Myanmar to anywhere with sound basic Public Heath Policy is absolutely ludicrous.
Ko Moe Aung
The era of dictatorship in Myanmar that brought about this quagmire are:
1) Ne Win isolationist/deprivation policy. 1962-1988
2) This dictatorship outwitting the useless careless policy of deprivation/isolation.1988-?
The Humanity within Myanmar has been raped twice, by the respective similar periods of dictatorships.
Both times with the full complicity of the West:
1) Letting Ne Win be Ne Win
2) Instituting the outrageously, unprecedented and unjustifiable sanction. A continuation of Ne Win policy, still insolently ongoing under the flimsiest guise of “progress in democratic changes” as touted by DASSK.
Demanding to give Myanmar it “Fair share of basic humanity need”,in heath care, education and economic well being make the Citizenry within neither beggars nor debtors to the irresponsible West.
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plan B,
So it’s demanding, not begging or borrowing. Fanciful.
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”
Unfortunately business and commerce are run on finance i.e. credit.
But there is such a thing called self reliance/self sufficiency.
And barking up the wrong tree constantly will only divert from the real issue – governance and priorities where the state coffers, at least their own wallets, are bursting at the seams.
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plan B,
You seem to be having it both ways: evil triumphs when good men do nothing (Ne Win era) , and ditto when they do something (SLORC/SPDC era). Assuming as you do that is that the West must not be other than a neutral agent of good. In God We Trust?
Progress with no political direction is fanciful. So is demanding that can only produce results from a position of strength. Besides a technological fix will not deliver on its own.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Credit greases the wheels of industry, trade and commerce, and delivers the social benefits such as health, education and transport infrastructure thereof provided they truly are the priorities of a govt. Why do you think so many countries are in hock and beholden to the IMF? Far from being irresponsible, its every move is calculated. Whether it’s really beneficial or detrimental to those on the receiving end is quite another story. But then again the survival of the prevailing socioeconomic order and the ruling class as its principle aim is not the same as the greater good of the country.
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Tsk tsk–So soon abandoning the true concept of ‘power to the people, in education, health care and economic well being’ for the minutia of archaic socialist takes ?
Ko Moe Aung
As an ardent follower of KISS principles, providing instead of depriving the most basic necessity of a Citizenry is a MUST, that will in turn enable the myriad of possibilities that are UNIQUE to Myanmar and only Myanmar.
Yet to see the days when the shenanigan of IMF, so called self interest of West economic hegemony etc in play with this military government.
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plan B,
Yes, power to the people…. like manna from heaven, Western heavens, eh? How very simplistic.
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