Here is a thoughtful and insightful anonymous response to the posting yesterday http://www.hivinfo4mm.org/university-of-sydney-reports-that-one-of-their-students-may-have-changed-history/.

Any response from the University of Sydney? Readers are welcome to send these postings to the U of S.

[him] moderator

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It is no surprise that a naive university from the developed world would like to claim that a significant change in a developing country is "caused" by one of its students. The student herself would be more than happy to take credit for it. In a similar instance, Uri Geller the renowned psychic spoon-bender once claimed that collapse of communism in the east bloc and the fallthe Soviet Union was because of his telepathic influence on the then soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in an informal meeting in 1988.

But this false assumption is such an unfair insult to the officials in the National AIDS Programme, Disease Control Division and the Myanmar Ministry of Health, such as Dr Saw Lwin and Dr Khin Ohnmar San, who drafted the budget to be approved by the Minister before putting up to the parliament. As required by the Global Fund and suggested by most major bilateral donors, the Ministry has been trying to get the public sector contribution for national health budget and the relatively more bottom-up approach this year permitted them to include some essential items into the national budget including ART.

The key glitch in the story, that highlights the ignorance and folly of the writer of the article is that the parliament is not and will never be tasked with budgeting ART or any budget line for a ministry. The assembly just approved or disapproved what the executive branch (the ministry and the cabinet) has proposed. Even if the parliament is tasked to do that and even if the Speaker came back enthused with the presentation by that student of U of S, MPs will never be able to come up with a budget in two weeks. Even if Myanmar Times picked up that news on the same day it was approved. The budget actually was developed months ahead by the Ministry and approved by parliament weeks before the NAP revealed it in a meeting. This preceded the Myanmar Times article by about a week.

This seemingly innocent and superficial mistake can go a long way in increasing the Ministry's distrust of NGOs.