Myanmar: Closing the HIV/AIDS “treatment gap”
Health workers in Myanmar are confident that efforts to narrow the country’s huge gap between access to, and need for, life-saving medicines to treat HIV/AIDS are back on track after the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria invited the country to apply for additional funding.
“I would not have dreamt that this was possible last
November,” said Peter Paul de Groote, head of mission for
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Myanmar,
referring to the
Global Fund’s cancellation of funding
that health workers in Myanmar were relying on to expand access
to antiretrovirals (ARVs).
Instead, MSF has been forced to turn away
people in need of ARVs. “It’s a trauma for patients sent away and for our
staff,” said de Groote.
The Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates 18,000
people die of AIDs-related illnesses annually in Myanmar.
The agency’s coordinator for Myanmar, Eamonn Murphy, said
new funds will allow the country to close a “treatment gap” where only one-third of the 120,000 people nationwide
who need ARVs receive them.
Health officials drafted a “concept note” outlining
how additional funding might be used, which will be reviewed by
the Global Fund’s board, Murphy said. It offers two
scenarios: the first ensures 85 percent of those who need ARVs
receive them by 2015; while with the second, 76 percent of
people would be covered, he said. Based on feedback from the
board, the government will choose a strategy for the proposal to
be submitted early next year.
A spokesman for the Global Fund said it “had encouraged an
application by the country for more money” following an
August visit to Myanmar by its general director. Additional
funding “could make possible an even faster scale-up of
HIV treatment.”
Health workers say government healthcare reforms - including a
first-time government allocation of US$2.4 million for ARVs this
year - as well as a recent managerial shakeup at the Global
Fund, have opened the way to boost HIV funding in Myanmar. The
Global Fund has installed new managers and is developing
a different funding model
to be piloted next year that will “invest more strategically”, according to the fund.
Top priority
Health experts in Myanmar agree ARVs are a top priority for the
country and that getting more money is contingent on proving
“targeted, tight and strategic” interventions can
have quick and major impacts.
De Groote said that due to lack of funding thus far, only
HIV-positive patients with counts of CD4 - a white blood cell
that targets infection - of 150 or below are eligible for ARVs
at MSF clinics (the main provider of ARVs nationwide), while the
World Health Organization (WHO) advises treatment for everyone
whose CD4 counts are 350 or below. A CD4 cell count is one way
of measuring the strength of a patient’s immune system as
well as how advanced an HIV infection is.
Besides expanding ARV access, the government is also applying
for additional money to combat tuberculosis (TB). The
country’s TB prevalence is nearly three times the global
average and twice the regional average, according to a 2010
survey by the country’s TB programme and WHO.
The
current Global Fund support
to fight TB in Myanmar was granted in 2009, based on old data
that underestimated prevalence by about 50 percent,
according to MSF.
IRIN
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/96531/MYANMAR-Closing-the-HIV-AIDS-treatment-gap
