One doctor working inside Myanmar – whose group receives roughly $1.5 million from USAID each year, but who asked not to be named amid concerns it could affect funding in the future – said the sudden halt demonstrates “a total lack of respect for ill people and life”.
Although Asia is not the biggest recipient of US aid – of the $60 billion in foreign assistance that was frozen by the Trump administration, roughly $3.9 billion is spent in South and Central Asia, and $2.1 billion in East Asia and Oceania – the freeze has hit Myanmar especially hard.
In Umpiem Mai camp in Thailand, which is home to more than 10,000 people who fled the brutal civil war in neighbouring Myanmar, a resident and a health worker told ABC that multiple patients who were reliant on oxygen have now died.
Pe Kha Lau, a refugee from Myanmar living in a displacement camp in neighbouring Thailand, died four days after she was discharged from a USAID-funded healthcare facility operated by the International Rescue Committee (IRC).
The organisation operates clinics that cater to roughly 80,000 people in nine refugee camps close to the Myanmar border, but abruptly closed and locked seven out of its nine hospitals to comply with the uncompromising US directive.
