The intimate and complex relationship between health and socioeconomic development is most readily seen in the close and presumably causal relationship between improvements in a country's socioeconomic status and gains in health status and life expectancy. In particular, improvements in the quality and stability of the food supply, progress in housing and sanitation, and advances in the quality and availability of health services have consistently translated into gains in such macrosocial health indicators as healthy life expectancy (Folch et al. 2003). Less evident but no less important is the close association between major population-level health events — phenomena such as epidemics of severe infectious disease or famine — and declines in a country's social and economic well-being (Bhagava et al. 2001; Watts 1997). This relationship is readily seen in the case of the plague epidemics in medieval Europe (Orent 2004) or the social, economic, and political disruptions effected by AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa (Barnett and Whiteside 2002; de Waal 2003). Other less dramatic but no less important examples include the chronic depression of economic productivity attributable to endemic malaria (Bonilla and Rodriguez 1993; Chima, Goodman, and Mills 2003; Sharma 1996; Utzinger et al. 2002) and seasonal peaks in worker absenteeism (with associated costs) which occur in conjunction with an outbreak of influenza (Szucs 1999).

For a country such as Myanmar where per capita income is low, health care services limited in coverage and sophistication, and general infrastructural development including housing and sanitation, wanting, the drag of adverse health conditions on socioeconomic progress is likely to be considerable, and the issue thus cannot be excluded from any discussion of the country's present status or future prospects. What this chapter sets out to do, therefore, is first to sketch in very broad terms the state of health and health services in Myanmar, and then to look in greater detail at the way in which one significant health event, the recent spread of HIV/AIDS, might be impacting upon national and regional (sub-national) development.