The RINJ Foundation HIV Test and Treat Project
The last of the RINJ Foundation team in Myanmar has left. Chinese nationals have completed quarantine in China and resumed duties there. Workers of other nationalities have completed their quarantine periods as well.
The RINJ Foundation is thankful to its security provider which arranged for water transport and land transport; and to RINJ suppliers, some of whom helped in the evacuation.
HIV transmission among Myanmar Military rapists may be high
It is difficult to assess the percentage of young male persons among the Myanmar military population who are testing positive for HIV-1/HIV-2 because the parties tested, came voluntarily.
Notwithstanding this, the parties had repeated sexual contact among Rohingya women and girls, many of whom if not all who had sexual contact with Myanmar army soldiers, claim they were raped. The fact that multiple soldiers were often raping the same women and girls, and even conducting gang rapes, caused the men to transmit their origin disease from one soldier to the next via an intermediary rape survivor who was raped by multiple perpetrators.
In this matter, since 2016 but primarily in spring to mid-2017 forward, rape has been used as a genocidal methodology or in the alternative accusation as an oppression method in the Rakhine state of Myanmar (once called Burma) to try and force Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar to the Bengal Bay region of Bangladesh.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to Bangladesh and to other countries in the general region including island nations of Southeast Asia and other mainland Southeast Asian nations.
The RINJ project of discretely testing soldiers for HIV in Myanmar sought to correlate test results in Bangladesh and to determine the spread of HIV among Myanmar soldiers and Rohingya victims of the genocide.
The RINJ Women are thankful to all parties who assisted in the project and urge the Myanmar military to conduct compulsory testing within the ranks and treat infected soldiers.
Over time, many soldiers have raped the same women creating occasions for the likely transmission of HIV among tens of thousands of persons.
HBV and syphilis were also found among the ranks and among Rohingya.
All names will be withheld in accordance with the agreement of confidentiality of test subjects. This assurance unconditionally stands as promised.
It is up to the Myanmar government to test its troops and other personnel and contain the outbreak of this lethal virus. It goes without saying that there is a problem of significance.
