After  a posting at http://www.hivinfo4mm.org/?p=4695, an anonymous reader asked: “Just curious, when you say Beyrer's claim is out of date, is it because you mean Burma is more like 25 years out of date?”

The commenter is referring to this snippet: "Burma is like the work that I did in Africa in the'90s. It's 15, 20 years out of date," says Dr. Chris Beyrer, an HIV expert at Johns Hopkins University who has worked in Myanmar for years. "If you actually tried to treat AIDS, you'd have to say that everybody with every other condition is going to die unless there are more resources."

I won't venture a guess at how 'out of date' Myanmar is with respect to democratic development. All countries are unique. In any case, comparing Asian countries to African ones is rarely helpful or leads to much insight.

But with respect to both the epidemic and the response to the epidemic, Chris Beyrer is speaking nonsense. I can’t find his work in Africa in the 1990s on the internet but he should know about the epidemics and responses there. HIV incidence in Myanmar started to fall ten years ago, long before it fell in most countries in Africa where the epidemic got much worse much earlier. And the prevention response to HIV in Myanmar has much higher coverage than most countries in Africa. Treatment coverage figures put Myanmar about in the middle of African country coverage, at most five years 'behind', and catching up quickly in order to overtake most African countries in the next three years. The response has been implemented using much less money than almost all other countries and THAT is advanced, not behind.