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Category: Health & Disease

August 24, 2016

If North Korea can make fake Viagra for export, why can’t it make TB drugs for sick North Koreans?

Since the collapse of North Korea’s nominally free public health system, contagious diseases have spread widely, but only a lucky few North Koreans have been able to find medicine and medical care. Most of its people get by on whatever health care they can afford and whatever drugs they can find. A lucky few use retired doctors or doctors who moonlight after regular working hours. Some pay steep bribes to get access to care and medicine in state hospitals and clinics....
Categories Famine & Food Aid/Health & Disease/Media Criticism
July 12, 2016

Prisoners of the People: N. Korea’s guerrilla society has political implications (updated)

Over the last year, I’ve become convinced that if technology can break the electronic barriers between North Korea and the Outer Earth, it would be possible to keep the broken promises of the Sunshine Policy by bypassing Pyongyang and engaging directly with the North Korean people. Governments, churches, and NGOs could harness markets, smuggling networks, and private agriculture to help North Koreans feed the hungry, heal the sick, share information and ideas, begin to rebuild their broken civil society, and...
Categories Capitalism/Health & Disease/Resistance/Subversion
September 28, 2015

A guerrilla health care system for North Korea’s poor

Gullible leftists and U.N. nincompoops who take North Korea’s claims of socialist equality at face value love to bleat about the wonders of its free universal health care, but those bleats have little basis in reality. A 2010 study by Amnesty International found that Pyongyang provides less for the care of its non-elite citizens per capita than almost any other nation on earth: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address the country’s ongoing food shortages since the 1990s. This failure has led to the current...
Categories Health & Disease
July 29, 2015

Must read: Jieun Baek on how North Koreans beat the border blockade

Admittedly, Baek’s explanation of the North Korea’s guerrilla banking system isn’t the first I’ve read, it’s only the best: The next time Kevin talks to his mother, she asks him for $1,000. She gives Kevin a phone number. When he hangs up after about a minute, Kevin then calls that number and tells the stranger on the line that he got a call from someone (he uses a pseudonym to protect his mother’s identity). Every time, the phone number is...
Categories Border Control/Capitalism/Health & Disease/Subversion
August 28, 2014

North Korean women who turned to prostitution to survive believe that opium

… protects them from STDs, and then end up addicted, according to this article in New Focus. Do you suppose the regime would acknowledge either prostitution or drug abuse enough to allow a public health education program to counteract this dangerous myth? On the other hand, if an NGO were to purchase some ad time on Radio Free North Korea or Open Radio for North Korea, it could deliver that message directly to an audience that desperately needs to hear...
Categories Health & Disease
July 15, 2010

WHO Knew? North Korea’s health care system is nothing to envy.

So, aside from stultifying political repression, famine, forced labor, criticism sessions, neighborhood spies, propaganda speakers in every home, prison camps for dissenters, and the occasional public execution, what has Kim Jong Il ever done for us? Ask any Chomsky-parroting career grad student in the East Bay and she’ll say, “universal health care!” Alas, those neocons at Amnesty International have come to crush their tiny, misshapen hippie souls with this extensive report: The North Korean government has failed to adequately address...
Categories Health & Disease
December 22, 2009

Biting the Hands that Feed Them

Via Open News for North Korea, we learn that the regime is blaming the H1N1 outbreak in North Korea — which has killed six students under 18 — on South Korea, the country that offered immediate and unconditional aid to help control said outbreak. After all, all bad things in North Korea come from beyond its borders. According to a source, North Korean Health Department has stated that the new strand of flu spreading in North Korea originated from South...
Categories Health & Disease/Propaganda
December 10, 2009

H1N1 Outbreak in North Korea Defies Perfection of Its Universal Health Care System

The outbreak is serious enough that North Korea has ended the school year prematurely, but still isn’t acknowledging the outbreak, though there are posters springing up advising the people to practice basic sanitation (though I wonder how many have clean water). The Daily NK suggests that shortages of coal and firewood to heat the schools are another reason for the closures. Shockingly, North Korea’s superior universal health care system hasn’t been effective at stemming the spread or diagnosing H1N1, according...
Categories Health & Disease/Useful Idiocy