malaria

Real life sprawls across categories. Tackling diarrheal diseases, for example, takes medicine, hygiene training, and toilets. A single project in isolation, even if it’s a good one, can’t by itself move a whole community forward. That’s why we work with our local partners to integrate health, education and community development.

In Burma, one in seven children die before they reach the age of five, and many of these deaths — due to diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria — are easily preventable. The challenge is to provide essential basic services to tens of thousands of villagers who have become nearly inaccessible due to civic conflict, displacement, and isolated and rugged jungle terrain.

In the mountainous jungle of eastern Burma, a petite 24-year-old Karen woman peels back layers of white plastic and cloth wrapped around a stalk of sugar cane — a prop simulating bone, muscle and skin — before cutting it with a cable saw to practice amputation.

The Thai-Burma border is often described as an "epicenter" of drug-resistant malaria. Malaria prevalence (the proportion of the population with the disease at any time) among internally displaced people in eastern Burma is up to twenty times higher than across the border in Thailand.

In addition to recording the second most malaria deaths of any country in Southeast Asia, Burma / Myanmar has historically been a regional epicenter of spreading resistance to vital anti-malarial drugs. The situation is worst in ethnic areas in the eastern, western and northern border regions, which receive little or no government health services and are inaccessible to large-scale international efforts.

Safe births, children who have essential immunizations and enough to eat, prevention and treatment of infectious disease, community health education — these are the foundations for healthy, vigorous communities.

Featured Publications

Reproductive Health: "Separated by Borders, United by Need"

A new report by Ibis Reproductive Health and Global Health Access Program (GHAP) documents a widespread public health emergency in populations affected by the decades-long conflict in eastern Burma / Myanmar.

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$40 treats one severely malnourished child in a therapeutic feeding program. In villages in eastern Burma/Myanmar, one-third of all children are malnourished.