Word: aids
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...have the franchise fans as well. I was a naysayer at one time, saying that it's too old and we're over it, but then I watched the gathering media story and I have been converted. I have drunk the Sex and the City Kool-Aid...
...donors have faced some government restrictions. Those who arrive in the towns have been asked to hand over their relief supplies to local authorities for distribution. Instead, many are reportedly storing the goods with sympathetic locals and secretly distributing them by themselves. The junta doesn't want foreigners distributing aid in the delta, but neither does it feel comfortable with Burmese distributing it. "The government is scared that relief workers will get involved in politics," says a co-founder of one Burmese relief group...
Burma's state-run media continues to portray a well-oiled state relief campaign: soldiers unloading relief supplies from helicopters, generals inspecting neat rows of refugee tents. Government propaganda is also used to justify the curtailment of most foreign assistance. This week the junta has ejected almost every expatriate aid worker from the disaster area. The people of Burma will "accept any kinds of foreign aid with appreciation," comments The New Light of Myanmar, a mouthpiece of the ruling junta. "However, they will not rely too much on international assistance and will reconstruct the nation on [a] self-reliance basis...
Propaganda will not change the deteriorating conditions in the delta. "There is an increase of people in the camps," writes an aid worker via satellite phone from the refugee-choked town of Laputta. "Heavy rain has caused flooding and worsened conditions and sanitation." There have been some cases of cholera, although so far the rate is "no greater than the background rate that we would be seeing in Myanmar during this season," a World Health Organization representative said today. Nearly 78,000 people are dead and 56,000 are missing, announced state television, almost doubling the previous count...
Meanwhile, foreigners - including aid workers, diplomats and undercover journalists - trying to enter the delta have been turned back at police checkpoints. Burmese citizens who have traveled down to the stricken Irrawaddy delta to distribute aid are aghast. "If our government really sympathized with these people," says travel agent Chin Chin, who traveled down to deliver aid herself, "it would be helping them more effectively...