Guardian story by way of WPR's Media Roundup.
The gist is familiar enough to long-time watchers:
A desperate picture of the health of North Korea's population is painted by a report describing a country of stunted children, where the hungry eat poisonous plants and pigfeed, amputations are conducted without anaesthetic and doctors are paid in cigarettes.
Almost two decades after it was hit by a famine that killed an estimated 2 million people, North Korea again faces widespread food shortages and is unable to provide even basic healthcare for its people, according to the report, published today by Amnesty International.
The human rights organisation accuses the North Korean regime of systematic neglect and calls on the international community to intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster.
Based on interviews with aid workers and North Korean defectors, the report says hospitals lack essential equipment and drugs, which forces the sick to treat themselves with medicines bought from markets. Major operations are routinely conducted without anaesthetic, while malnutrition has paved the way for a tuberculosis epidemic.
Nice.
Another factoid:
Last year Unicef said that between 2003 and 2008, 45% of North Korean children under five were stunted, while 9% suffered from wasting and a quarter were underweight.
The longer this goes on, the bigger the ultimate aid bill. How South Korea turns a blind eye on this always amazes me, even more so than China's cynical exploitation of the situation to loot the place of minerals.