The Myanmar country progress report to the UN is out.

With 40,000 people on treatment (almost double that of Indonesia which has an epidemic approximately the same size and a lot more money), it is possible to have 70,000 in the next four years. Money is not the only constraint.

120,000 people needing treatment out of 210,000 people living with HIV is just an estimate based on a percentage. The report states that "over 70% of the total number of people receiving ARV were in Yangon, Kachin state and Mandalay." How many of them are not from these places? How much would it take to eliminate the waiting lists there?

Figure 6 on page 11 is interesting. The [him] moderator has two comments. One is that using aggregate figures may hide important differences between sites. Site-specific falls in prevalence are better. Even more importantly, age has nothing to do with infection. It would be extremely useful to see a subgroup analysis of people who have recently begun injecting drugs or recently begun sex work broken down by site. Then it would be possible to say whether incidence is likely falling among members of that group at that site.

This analysis takes about an hour.

Figure 7 on page 12 shows that incidence has probably been declining since the early part of the century.

VCT is reported under prevention but VCT does not prevent HIV acquisition and rarely prevents transmission among people who test negative. The number of people undergoing VCT is not rising for four years. Is there an unmet need for VCT among the three key populations? Are low risk people being tested too much?

Almost nine million needles and syringes were distributed last year. Wow.

Finally, PMTCT. The number of women tested is not reported. How many refuse? There are up to a million births a year so the math is easy to do.

Comments?

[him] moderator

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http://www.unaids.org/en/dataanalysis/monitoringcountryprogress/progressreports/2012countries/ce_MM_Narrative_Report.pdf