The Marmot’s Hole

There are several good reasons to live in North Korea - there’s……..ah well, there’s …………, ah…., oh yeah…, there is this reason. According to Yonhap news which received their information from the North Korean English weekly “The DPRK is the sole country on the earth that has no AIDS-related patients so far.” I assume that this statement was made after they deported the 27 foreigners from the Land of Great Health.

However, the YouandAids organization/asia has the following to say on their site:

“Like for other sectors, the information available on HIV/AIDS [in North Korea] is too sparse. Some estimates show that by 2000, that there were fewer than 100 HIV infections in the country.”
For South Korea they estimated that in 2003 there were 8,300 cases of AIDS, this is a much larger number than the cases confirmed by the South Korean government.

In comparison to some of the other countries in Asia I have included the following data obtained from the YouandAids organization. The very isolated country of Bhutan had its first case in 1993; Mongolia had three confirmed cases as of July 2001; Afghanistan had eleven; Nepal had 2,392 reported cases of HIV and it was estimated that over 60,000 citizens were living with HIV; Maldives, a small island nation, had 135 cases of HIV but 123 of them were foreigners; China was estimated to have 840,000 with HIV as of the end of 2003; and finally India has 5,100,000 at the end of 2003.

I wonder, with the great need for cash that North Korea has - and the need for blood that China has, is it possible that North Korea has resorted to selling blood in the past?

What about blood donation in North Korea - how is it handled and how often does blood testing take place?

How often are foreigners tested in North Korea for diseases - and why wasn’t it done prior to the foreigner’s arrival?

In the event that a North Korean does become infected with HIV what would be his treatment - would he be shipped away to a camp or hospital?

Would NK acknowledge the case or would they try to hide it and deny it?