In 1999, the junta that rules Burma reported that 802 people died of AIDS. The real number is more like 48,000, says Chris Breyer, a consultant with the World Health Organization. The government is hiding the epidemic, according to an article in the Bangkok Post.

UNAIDS, the United Nations body that deals most directly with the pandemic, said that their work corroborates Breyer's. It estimates that almost 3.5% of the adult Burmese population is HIV-positive. In Cambodia, about 4% of adults have the virus as well. In Thailand, which sits between the two, the HIV rate is significantly lower, due in part to an aggressive anti-Aids campaign when the virus first reached the country early in the last decade.

Breyer's study was to be presented to the UN General Assembly yesterday, during the UN's special session on the disease. Breyer is an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in the USA, and an expert on Aids in Southeast Asia. "The bottom-line issue here is that people who know about the HIV epidemic in the region are very concerned about the situation in Burma," he said.

* junta (pronunciation: 'hun-ta): a council or committee for political or governmental purposes; especially : a group of persons controlling a government especially after a revolutionary seizure of power (Merriam-Webster)