8 July 2008 ---Relief and rehabilitation efforts are making progress in Cyclone Nargis-hit regions in Myanmar, despite difficulties in the supply and transportation work, a United Nations agency said on Monday.

` The government of Myanmar has spent a lot of money on relief and rehabilitation tasks, a UNICEF spokewoman Zafrin Chowdhury told the Associated Press, praising individual volunteers as well for their work.

Cyclone Nargis severely hit Yangon and Ayeyawady divisions on 2 and 3 May, killing 84,537 people and leaving 53,836 missing.

It’s a very challenging situation. Access is quite difficult and most places in the delta are reachable only by boat, she said. Helicopters chartered on behalf of the UN World Food Program are also being used to airlift essential supplies where trucks cannot go.

The casualties in Myanmar were on a scale experienced by other countries in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

An Indonesian expert compared Myanmar’s recovery effort favourably to the one made by his own country after the tsunami.

Heru Prasetyo of Tsunami Rehabilitation and Reconstruction for Aceh and Nlas spoke at a meeting last week to review postdisaster response and recovery. It looked at the work and future duties of the Tripartite Core Group, comprising representatives of the government, UN agencies and the 10 – member Association of South-east Asian nation (ASEAN)— of which Myanmar is a member.

“Judging the progress in the eighth week so far, the TCG efforts in managing response and repairing the recovery has placed Myanmar Nargis in much more advanced stage compared to the Aceh tsunami then,” Heru said at the meeting.

An ASEAN-led Post- Nargis joint Assessment Team that surveyed cyclone-hit areas of Myanmar issued preliminary findings late last month indicating that a feared wave of postcyclone deaths and disease had not occurred.

The full report of the team is supposed to be released at a meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers on July 20-21 in Singapore.