Asian Harm Reduction Network (AHRN) – Myanmar သည္ ၿမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ၂၀၀၃ ခုႏွစ္မွစတင္ၿပီး မူးယစ္ေဆးသံုးစြဲသူမ်ားႏွင့္ ၿပည္သူလူထုၾကားမူးယစ္ေဆး၀ါးႏွင့္ဆက္ႏြယ္ေသာေဘးအႏၱရာယ္မ်ား ေလ်ာ႔ပါးေရးအတြက္ ကူးစက္ေရာဂါမ်ားကာကြယ္ၿခင္း၊ ကုသၿခင္း၊ ပညာေပးၿခင္း လုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကိုေဆာင္ရြက္ေနသည့္ အစိုးရမဟုတ္ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာအဖြဲ႕အစည္းၿဖစ္ပါသည္။ အဆိုပါ က်န္းမာေရးလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားကို အက်ိဳးအၿမတ္မယူပဲေဆာင္ရြက္လာခဲ႔သည္မွာ ၂၀၁၈ ခုနွစ္တြင္ ၁၅ ႏွစ္ျပည့္ေၿမာက္ခဲ႔ ၿပီၿဖစ္ပါသည္။

In order to improve the capacity and quality of medical staff working in the front line of AHRN’s projects, clinical and blood testing training for nurses has been conducted from 14/06/2018 to 16/06/2018 in Mandalay. 33 Nurses, Nurse-Counselors, Health Assistant and Nurse in charge from all AHRN projects attend the training. Dr. Aung Yu Naing, Health Director provided the topics on HIV and TB Nursing care; Dr. Kyaw Thu Hein, Program Coordinator (Health Affairs) on cold chain management, Hepatitis B, C, MMT and Drug addiction; Ma Lea Lea Cho (Laboratory Coordinator) provided the training on blood testings related SOPs, quality control and documentation.

We are proud to share with you that AHRN celebrates the 2nd anniversary of operating it’s Drop-in-Center/Key Population Service Center (KSC) in Tharmakhan, Hpakant Township, Kachin State.
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AHRN provided comprehensive life-saving Harm Reduction services to more than 1400 PWIDs/PWUDs per year. By taking this opportunity, we, AHRN family, would like to express our sincere and humble gratitude to our beneficiaries, our clients who are playing a critical role in the harm reduction activities. Without their compassionate and skilled participation, we could achieve little.
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We are ever so proud! AHRN is celebrating one year anniversary of Shwe Gu DiC by paying tribute to our clients, who proven over and over to play a critical role in our critical life-saving Harm Reduction activities. Without their energy, commitment and friendly cooperation between staff and clients our work would not be possible.
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Dr. Yan Naing Tun, Project Manager of Shwe Gu, gave heartfelt thanks to the clients and to the staff for good cooperation in harm reduction activities.
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Our joint motto: “We can’t walk alone”.
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Pictures are showing us enjoying refreshing coconut agar, Myanmar’s traditional sweet jelly.

“Refresher Counseling Training” 2 days training from 13 May to 14 May 2017 was successfully conducted in Hpakant Township. The training was led by Ma Thazin Than Naing (Program Coordinator-Counselling), AHRN Yangon Head Office and 4 front line leaders (Counselling Officers) from counselling team of AHRN project sites – Myitkyina, Hpakant, Seng Taung and Lone Khin and 14 counselors from counseling team of AHRN project sites – Waimaw, ACF Kachin, Hpakant, Seng Taung, Lone Khin, Thamakham and Sel Zinn came and joined the training.
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Counseling is an essential part of drug treatment for many people. PWID/ PWUD and their Family & Partners are provided counseling services like harm reduction counseling, HTC, HIV counseling (Positive Living), Family & Partners counseling (lose and grieve, bereavement), MMT Counseling, TB Counseling and ART counseling.
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A counselor helps individuals and families deal with difficulty in emotions, difficulty in solving problems and mental health disorders. A counselor provides therapy, coaching and counseling to help his/her clients manage their stress, redirect disturbing emotions and set goals for themselves.

“. . . . I think it is very easy to quit using heroin, but to stop using methadone is more difficult; people say methadone is also addictive . . . . ” . . . . .(a client from Hpakant)
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Providing correct educational messages to people considering or seeking methadone maintenance drug treatment (MMT) is critically important. There are many aspects that clients starting MMT need to know on the use and the challenges such as for example adherence to drug treatment, myths do not help.
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Staff working with people who inject and/or use drugs and providing the care and support of users in drug treatment are facing challenging and demanding circumstances.
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Understanding drug dependency which typically include a strong desire to take the drug, difficulties in controlling its use, persisting in its use despite harmful consequences, a higher priority given to drug use than to other activities and obligations, increased tolerance, and sometimes a physical withdrawal is therefore critical for our staff.
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Dealing with drug use as social phenomena and drug dependency as a cluster of behavioural, psycho-social, cognitive, disconnection and neuro-physiological factors, aggravated by repeated substance use, needs constant staff and clients capacity building.
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By approaching dependency in an holistic way AHRN is able to support our clients who are facing drug dependency and their daily struggles to deal with controlling its drug use.
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AHRN is actively participating methadone maintenance therapy program of Ministry of Health & Sports in a multidisciplinary way where the whole team from medical staff to psychosocial counselors and (peer) treatment supporters and the clients work together to find a way to stability, respect and positive change.
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“Training on Drug Dependency and Community Based Methadone Maintenance Therapy” was conducted on 13 and 14 May, 2017 at Hpakant Township. The two-days training was attended actively by 38 AHRN staffs from Hpakant, Seng Taung, Lone Khinn and Waimaw projects. The training was disseminated by Dr. Thein Han (Program Coordinator-Drug Treatment) and Dr. Thuya Tun (Medical Supervisor-MMT).

Dr Aung Yu Naing presenting well received AHRN TB workplan ambitions during the 2018-2020 Global Fund consultation meeting in Nay Pyi Taw.

HIV testing and counseling (HTC) has existed for over 20 years although it is still not accessible universally. HTC serves as a key entry point to care, treatment, and support for people living with HIV. According to WHO, forty percent of people living with HIV do not know their HIV status. Community-based HIV testing services can reach marginalized population and people in hard-to-reach areas. UNAIDS has an ambitious target i.e. 90% of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status by 2020. To fulfill 90% target, innovative approaches are deemed necessary.
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AHRN is providing mobile HTC services to key affected and hidden population: people who inject drugs and people who use drugs in hard-to-reach rural conflict areas. With the objective of providing effective and efficient HIV testing & counseling services with the basic principles of 5Cs: consent, confidentiality, counseling, correct results and connection to treatment services, AHRN conducted a 4-days training on mobile HTC from 23 to 26 January, 2017 at Yangon Head Office. A total of 11 participants from Myitkyina, Kalay, Kathar, Shwe Gu and Laukkai actively attended the training.

The AHRN Board of Directors visited Myanmar from 6 to 10 February 2017, a most welcomed, worthwhile and pleasant learning and sharing experience. The Board provided guidance and direction in range of meetings with the Central Management Team in Yangon, the training provided on Hepatitis C and Dual Diagnosis and on Outreach was highly valued, the visiting to Lashio Project in Northern Shan State was a highlight of this visit.