US aid cuts kneecap Myanmar in fight against tuberculosis

United States funding cuts have hit TB treatment in Myanmar particularly hard, leaving many of the country’s most vulnerable in a precarious position after the post-coup healthcare collapse erased years of progress.

By ANT PWEH AUNG | FRONTIER 

It was mid last year when truck driver U Kyaw Than came down with a severe fever. He had just completed one of his regular six-hour trips delivering rice and other food items from Mandalay to southern Shan State, but it wasn’t just the grueling job making him ill. He was soon diagnosed with drug-resistant tuberculosis.

The news was devastating but not surprising. For two years, he and his wife had already been living with HIV, a virus that significantly raises the risk of getting TB – an infectious bacterial disease that mostly afflicts the lungs and can be fatal if left untreated. Fortunately, Kyaw Than’s wife hasn’t contracted TB, and their four-year-old daughter is free from both infections, but his diagnosis has still had a profound effect on the family.