Hospitals ordered to shut by Friday, as Thai authorities plan persistent transfers, assess medical needs
PUBLISHED: 29 Jan 2025 at 13: 42
After US President Donald Trump frozen most international aid last year, forcing Thai leaders to carry the sickest people to other facilities, the healthcare facilities serving tens of thousands of refugees on the Thai-Myanmar borders have been ordered to close.
According to a local official and two camp committee members, the International Rescue Committee ( IRC ), which provides funding for the clinics with US assistance, ordered the facilities to shut down by Friday.
The IRC did not respond to a post demand.
Trump put a 90-day suspension on development assistance from the US Agency for International Development ( USAID ) last week to check whether it was in line with his” America First” policy.
The ice has thrown the international support sector, which is heavily funded by the US, into panic.
How many centers across the nine shelters that housed around 100, 000 people were affected by a waiver for life-saving charitable guidance issued by the State Department on Tuesday, or what kind of effect it would have.
Tens of thousands of immigrants from Myanmar are served by the health services on the border.
Bweh State, a local teacher and part of the migrant council at Mae La tent in Tha Song Yang district, claimed on Wednesday that the IRC had now discharged patients and prevented people who are unable to use their equipment and medicine, including pregnant women and people who are dependent on oxygen tanks.
The camp’s water distribution and garbage disposal systems, which the organisation had also been helping with, were also affected, they said.
Refugees, who have fled a flare-up in fighting between the , Myanmar , army and insurgent groups and settled temporarily on the Moei riverbank, receive aid from Thailand on the , Thai-Myanmar , border in Mae Sot, Thailand, on Jan 6, 2022. ( Photo: Reuters )
Some of the people who had been discharged had relatives who were” trying to find oxygen tanks” to bring home, according to Bweh Say.
About 50 patients had been discharged, while several severely ill patients remained in the Mae La hospital, including a child recovering from heart surgery, said the schoolteacher, declining to be named because they were not authorised to speak publicly.
” Normally that hospital receives about 100 out-patients per day and now none”, the teacher said.
The governor of Tak province, Chucheeep Pongchai, added that officials have requested that the IRC use their equipment, in order to transfer the most seriously ill patients to nearby state hospitals.
Dr Tawatchai Yingtaweesak, director of Tha Song Yang hospital, said he was travelling to the camp to assess patients.
He told Reuters by phone,” We have to decide which patients can go home, which patients require oxygen assistance, and so on.”
There is growing concern that basic healthcare needs in the camps won’t be met, according to Nai Aue Mon, program director of the Human Rights Foundation of Monland ( HURFOM), a grassroots organization in southern Myanmar.
” It’s scary because these refugees depend entirely on this assistance for their day-to-day health services”.