Behavioural sentinel surveillance data collected two and a half years ago by the National AIDS Programme has been published in a report entitled “Behavioural Surveillance Survey 2003 General Population and Youth”. It is available as a two megabyte file at http://www.unaids.org/en/Regions_Countries/Countries/myanmar.asp So it is effectively unavailable to most people living in the county.

Here is the Executive Summary:

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Executive Summary

A multi-site survey was conducted during September through November 2003 to assess the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors related to transmission and prevention of HIV and AIDS among general population and youths residing in seven survey sites in Myanmar. A total of 9678 individuals (4631 males and 5047 females) were interviewed. Of these, 35% were youth aged 15-24 years.

Although 91% of the population had heard about HIV and AIDS, only 35% knew about methods of HIV prevention and barely 27% were able to correctly reject the common misconceptions about HIV transmission. Youth, women and respondents with lowest level of education had the lowest knowledge about HIV prevention. Less than a quarter of the respondents were willing to buy food from an HIV-infected vendor and just half of them expressed willingness to care for an HIV-infected relative.

Only a quarter of the population sought treatment for sexually transmitted disease (STD) symptoms; a large proportion of these consulted a private practitioner or took self treatment and only 15% visited a government hospital for STD treatment. About 7% of men had sex with a non-regular partner; nearly twothirds of them had unprotected sex (only 54% of male respondents reported using condom consistently with a commercial sex worker and 18% with a casual acquaintance).

While 68% respondents expressed the intent for voluntary confidential counseling and testing (VCCT) but a mere 5% actually got tested and received the result. The findings of the survey indicate the following programmatic gaps:
• Knowledge about HIV prevention is deficient
• High level of misconceptions about HIV transmission prevail
• Negative attitudes towards PLWHA are common
• Utilization of STD services is suboptimal
• High-risk sexual behaviours exist and unprotected sex is common
• VCCT needs remain unmet

Key recommendations

1. Revitalize and scale-up the HIV and AIDS Information education and Communication (IEC) campaign against HIV and AIDS by: evaluating current IEC strategies, identifying innovative mechanisms to disseminate key HIV prevention messages, and by targeting IEC to vulnerable groups such as out-of school youth and women in reproductive age group

2. Accord top priority to reduce stigma and discrimination against PLWHAs by engaging prominent public figures to convey the message of care and compassion towards PLWHAs, and; engaging PLWHA groups in stigma reduction activities.

3. Improve the utilization of STD services by increasing community awareness about the importance of early treatment of STDs, and; sustaining the training of governmental and non-governmental health workers and private practitioners in the treatment of STDs

4. Re-emphasize consistent condom use for sex with all non-regular partners. Explore additional avenues to increase the access to condoms and undertake formative research to identify reasons for low level of condom utilization.

5. Urgently increase VCCT services and improve utilization by: further expanding the number of VCCT sites; exploring the possibility of establishing VCCT sites in nongovernmental institutions; creating awareness in the community about the location of VCCT sites; improving the quality of VCCT services and making them more clientfriendly by training of counselors.