Norway has offered 5 million Norwegian Kroner (about 770,000 U.S. dollars) to a new Myanmar's Three Diseases (3D) Fund to help the country fight AIDS, tuberculosis (TB) and malaria, the local weekly Khit Myanmar reported Friday.

Quoting sources with the Norwegian Embassy, the report said the Norwegian aid is for 3D Fund's 2006 undertaking.

The Norwegian donation constitutes part of a 99.5 million dollars' joint donor program for five years under a memorandum of understanding signed between the Myanmar Health Ministry and the UN Office for Project Services in the new capital of Nay Pyi Taw in October.

The 3D Fund was set up by a group of six donors which comprises the European Commission, Sweden's Sida, the Netherlands, United Kingdom Department for International Development, Norway and Australia's Aus AID to compensate for grants which were suspended in August 2005 by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria.

The 3D Fund has also included 36 million dollars from the United Kingdom Department for International Development and over 11 million dollars from the Australian Government Aid Program (Aus AID)'s pledged respectively in last August.

The 3D Fund is said to be used for providing insecticide- treated nets for malaria prevention, increasing access to TB diagnosis and treatment and promoting condom use and expanded HIV testing.

Meanwhile, a recent workshop involving Myanmar, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS stated that 338,911 people were estimated to have lived with HIV/AIDS in 2004 and the HIV prevalence in Myanmar has reduced from 1.5 percent in 2000 to 1.3 percent in 2005.

It is estimated that about 100,000 new TB patients develop annually and about half of them are infectious cases, the Myanmar health ministry said, disclosing that Myanmar achieved 95 percent TB case detection rate and 84 percent treatment success rate in 2005.

Meanwhile, the trend of malaria morbidity and mortality has been decreasing at present with malaria morbidity per 1,000 population reducing from 24.5 in 1988-89 to 9.3 in 2005-06, while its mortality down from 10.4 to 3.1 correspondingly, according to the ministry.

Myanmar has designated AIDS, TB and malaria as three major communicable diseases of national concern and efforts are being made to combat the three diseases.

Source: Xinhua