Famine, floods, and a healthcare system on the brink of collapse have pushed North Korea's death rate up by almost 40% in the past seven years, Gro Harlem Brundtland, director general of the World Health Organization, has said.
Ms Brundtland, who was speaking on her return from a four day visit to Pyongyang, appealed for aid to rebuild a healthcare system that she said was losing the fight against preventable diseases.
“There are many gaps that need to be filled, and there are many people who suffer from a lack of medical equipment and drugs and even infrastructural problems,” she said.
Until a decade ago the reclusive state boasted an extensive publicly funded health service, but it has been hit hard by the economic decline that followed the fall of its main ally, the Soviet Union, in 1989 and a series of droughts and floods.
It was Ms Brundtland's first visit to Pyongyang, where the WHO has just established a permanent office. She oversaw the first delivery of drugs for tuberculosis, which will be used to treat more than 30000 people with the disease.
“They are poor, they have a big burden of disease, and children are suffering,” Ms Brundtland said afterwards in Seoul. “We have reason to believe that the number of deaths each year has risen from 6.3 per 100 people to 9.3 since 1994.”
Given North Korea's population of about 22 million, this suggests that the number of people dying each year has increased from 1.4 million to two million.
The rise in mortality in North Korea is a controversial subject. The government in Pyongyang claims that 220000 people died of hunger or hunger related diseases between 1995 and 1998. But a US congressional team that visited the country estimates that the figure is closer to 2 million.
Figure.
AP PHOTO/YONHAP
Gro Harlem Brundtland, the WHO”s director general, talks to the South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, after her visit to North Korea