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Bkk Post-Thailand hailed for pionee



Subject: Bkk Post-Thailand hailed for pioneering efforts

Bangkok post - July 24, 1999.
Thailand hailed for pioneering efforts
Neighbouring states remain vulnerable, warns UN agency

Thailand has taken pioneering measures to fight the spread of Aids, but the
killer disease is racing ahead in neighbouring Burma and Cambodia, the UN
Children's Fund said.

At the same time, Unicef warns that economic circumstances, such as the
large amounts of external debt held by several Southeast Asian countries,
pose a threat to children's health and well-being.

Unicef's 1999 edition of The Progress of Nations, released regionally in
Chiang Mai, also outlines how the global fight to eradicate polio seems
largely won.

For the first time, the report publishes an index called the Child Risk
Measure, which takes into consideration such factors as child mortality
levels, percentage of children malnourished and not in school, risk due to
conflict and the prevalence of Aids and HIV virus that causes it.

Using a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 represents the worst risk, it finds
that average regional risk is lowest in Europe, rated 6, and highest in
sub-Saharan Africa at 61.

The average for East and South Asia and the Pacific is 31, better than
Central Asia at 41 but worse than the Middle East and North Africa at 24 and
the Americas at 10.

Cambodia and Papua New Guinea score the worst ratings in the Asia-Pacific
region. Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Mongolia do better than
average among developing Asian nations.

In remarks prepared for delivery with the release of the report, Kul Gautam,
Unicef's regional director for East Asia and the Pacific, praised Thailand
for doing more than perhaps any other developing country to tackle Aids.

"Due to the government's relatively early recognition of the threat of Aids,
and the forceful attack mounted against it at all levels of society, the
rate of new infections in Thailand has dropped by one third and condom use
has risen significantly," he said.

Noting that Thailand has the most advanced epidemic of Aids in the region,
he warned the disease is growing at "potentially catastrophic rates" in
other countries.

Between 1994 and 1997, the number of children living with the virus
quadrupled in China and Vietnam and tripled in Cambodia, Malaysia and Burma,

Mr Gautam said.

The report discusses the knock-on effects of the Aids epidemic on child
health, nutrition and education, directly through infection, as well as from
the loss of parents and caregivers, and the opportunity-costs of increased
medical expenditures.

The report also underlines economic matters in a discussion of what Mr
Gautam called the "unsustainable high level of debt faced by many developing
countries".

The problem is most severe in sub-Saharan Africa, said Mr Gautam, but the
Asian economic crisis two years ago pushed debt levels alarmingly high in
such countries as Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Many developing countries are forced to spend more on servicing their debt
than on health, education and other social service programmes for their
children, Mr Gautam said.

"The bodies, minds and futures of these children are, quite literally, being
sacrificed on the altar of debt," he said.

More upbeat, the report says that polio is on the verge of eradication in
most of the world just two decades after the wiping out of smallpox, for
centuries a dreaded scourge.

While only a decade ago some 10,000 children in China were paralysed in an
epidemic. The region's last reported case was in Cambodia in 1997.

National campaigns to immunise children-which in 1998 alone protected 450
million-were recognised as so important that warring factions in Cambodia,
the Philippines and most recently East Timor agreed to "days of
tranquillity".-APuEditorial page 8