Two and a half million people have been made homeless or destitute by Cyclone Nargis, but for one of the tiniest of them, a two-month-old infant named Kyaw Zin Law, Thursday might have been the day that gave him a glimmer of hope. I had met the baby boy and his mother nine days ago and at the time it was hard to believe that he would live out the week. His limbs were emaciated and he barely had the energy to cry.

But Kyaw Zin Law is tougher than he looks. He survived the wind that blew away his house and the flood that drowned his neighbours. He has clung on for two weeks in a ruined monastery where hundreds of refugees sleep head to toe. His weight has dropped and his temperature has soared, but on Thursday morning he finally saw a doctor. She diagnosed severe pneumonia and malnutrition and referred him to a hospital for tests and treatment. One thing stands between Kyaw Zin Law and the treatment that would save his life: money.

Having lost their home his parents have nothing but the clothes they wear and the small amount of rice that kindly local people give them. They are simple people and the prospect of going to the hospital, finding a doctor and purchasing drugs is beyond their experience and finances.

“I came away feeling so pessimistic,” said the Burmese friend who visited Kyaw Zin Law and his family this week. “The doctor who saw the boy did her best, but she was not a specialist. She had only simple drugs such as paracetamol and there was nothing she could do for him. The laboratory tests could easily cost 60,000 kyat [£25].”.

This is the reality of life in the Irrawaddy delta after Cyclone Nargis. It is not true to say that no help is getting through, for some is – such as the Burmese government doctor who briefly examined Kyaw Zin Law. But it is so inadequate as to generate as much frustration as relief. Two weeks after the worst natural disaster in its modern history the Burmese Government is like a doctor applying a sticking plaster to a severed limb. State television yesterday put the latest figures at 77,738 dead and 55,917 missing.

It was impossible for me to visit Kyaw Zin Law in person; instead a Burmese friend made the three-hour journey from the old capital, Rangoon, to the monastery in the town of Pyapon where the little boy and his family shelter. The photographs he took show that much has changed since I made the journey a week earlier, little of it for the better.

It is not only the roadblocks designed to keep out legitimate foreign aid workers, as well as clandestinely operating journalists. People living in the towns along the road have improvised repairs to those houses that remain standing, to keep out the monsoon rains. But they are under increasing pressure from an incoming population from villages where the cyclone did its worst.

They stand in their thousands all along the road, in an orderly line that in places is several people deep – men, women and children, some of them unaccompanied by parents or friends. When an aid truck stops – one provided by the Government or by the many Burmese private benefactors who are converging on the delta – they form anxious queues until the limited supplies quickly and inevitably run out.

My Burmese friend was told by local people that in one riverside town, Dalat, refugees were invited into a smart group of tents before the arrival of General Hla Htay Win, military commander of the Rangoon division. After the general had carried out his inspection of the spick and span camp, posed for photographs and buzzed off in his helicopter, the refugees were turned out on to the road again.

In the absence of independent foreign observers, nasty rumours are circulating. Refugees are said to be pressganged into breaking stones for road building for 1,000 kyat a day, and to have been forcibly relocated far away from their villages.

There are repeated reports that foreign aid has been sold off for profit in markets, although no one has produced a verifiable example of this. Hakan Tongul, of the UN World Food Programme, told The Times in Rangoon yesterday that his staff had found the organisation’s own high-energy biscuits on sale in markets in the city – but that these might simply have been sold on in small numbers by refugees who had received them legitimately, rather than in bulk by corrupt members of the Government.

The World Health Organisation confirmed yesterday that cases of cholera have been found in the delta, but emphasised that the disease is endemic in Burma and that the present small number of cases does not exceed normal levels for this time of year. But cholera can spread quickly in refugee camp conditions and the deadly consequences of an epidemic are obvious to everyone.

The whole region endures in the same situation as Kyaw Zin Law: lamentably neglected, vulnerable, but just surviving from day to day, thanks to no one and nothing but his own will to live.

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