An ethnic Karen girl from Myanmar waits for Thai authorities to let her into a refugee camp, June 2007. REUTERS/Sukree Sukplang
BANGKOK (AlertNet) - Eastern Myanmar is in the grip of a major health crisis caused by decades of civil war, human rights abuses and government neglect, a report released on Tuesday said.
Women and children from ethnic minorities in the east bear the brunt of the crisis, which is one of the worst in Asia, according to the report written by local health organisations and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
"Health indicators for these communities, particularly for women and children, are worse than Burma&${esc.hash}39;s official national figures, which are already amongst the worst in the world," said the report "Diagnosis: Critical", based on a survey of 27,000 people in six states and divisions in eastern Myanmar.
Myanmar was called Burma until the regime changed its name in 1989.
Child death rates are nearly twice the official national figure, and the number of women dying during pregnancy and childbirth is triple the national figure. The maternal mortality rate at 721 deaths per 100,000 live births, is close to World Bank figures for war-torn Sudan (750 deaths) and Democratic Republic of Congo (670 deaths).
Although violence is endemic in the areas where the survey was conducted, only a tiny proportion of deaths - 2.3 percent - were directly caused by violence.
The eastern region has one of the highest rates of malaria in the world, and 40 percent of children suffer from malnutrition, more than half die from preventable diseases such as malaria and diarrhoea and one in seven will die before their fifth birthday, according to the report.
"There really isn&${esc.hash}39;t anything else out there that resembles figures like we are presenting here... it remains a chronic emergency," Dr. Voravit Suwanvanichkij from John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health which provided technical support for the survey, said at the report&${esc.hash}39;s launch in Bangkok.
Eastern Myanmar&${esc.hash}39;s annual outbreaks of malaria, cholera and drug-resistant tuberculosis have "destabilising consequences for the region", Suwanvanichkij added.
ABUSE AND HEALTH CRISIS RELATEDThe military government, which has been in power since 1962, has been waging decades-long wars with ethnic groups in the country&${esc.hash}39;s east. Human rights organisations say ethnic groups routinely suffer abuses at the hands of the Myanmar army.
More than 30 percent of the surveyed population had suffered "systematic" human rights abuses the year before, ranging from forced labour to displacement. These abuses have had a direct and serious impact on the health crisis, the report said.
Children in displaced families were three times more likely to suffer from acute malnutrition and 60 percent more likely to suffer diarrhoea. "The odds of children dying before age one were doubled in households forced to provide labour," it said.
Many of the displaced are unable to access government health services and, in the absence of a working public health care system, community health groups have taken over the role of providing much-needed care and support.
There are 446,000 internally displaced people in rural parts of eastern Myanmar, according to the report, and refugee camps along the border with Thailand house over 145,000 people.
Dr. Cynthia Maung, who runs the Mae Tao clinic on the Thai-Myanmar border and trains the Back Pack Health Worker Team which helped conduct the survey, said health care in Myanmar as a whole has worsened over the past 20 years.
"Today, almost half of all our clients come from Burma and almost 70 percent of in-patients - the more serious cases - come from inside Burma too," she said, adding more and more people are risking their lives to cross the border to visit her clinic.
"It is a crime that so many lives in eastern Burma, particularly women and children, are lost due to preventable and treatable diseases," Maung said.
"We are doing what we can to help but, without the end of the regime&${esc.hash}39;s abuses, this health crisis will continue."
The survey was conducted in Bago, Kayin, Kayah, Mon, Shan and Tanintharyi states and divisions.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
