Cases of waterborne diseases are skyrocketing in North Korea’s South Pyongan Province. Waterborne diseases spread every summer, but shortages of medicine are making it difficult to deal with the situation.
“Many people have recently come down with diseases such as cholera and paratyphoid fever because they are drinking foul water,” a source in South Pyongan Province told Daily NK on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. “People in the mountains of Yangdok and Maengsan, where the water is good, don’t get sick even if you tell them to, while many people fall ill in coastal areas with bad water [such as Mundok, Pyongwon and Sukchon].”
The problem is residents cannot receive proper treatment due to chronic drug shortages.
“Hospitals haven’t provided medications in a long while, and everything relies entirely on self-sufficiency. If you’ve got a fever, you usually buy aspirin or phenacetin at the market, or if you’ve got diarrhea, you buy diarrhea remedies or laudanum. But nowadays, due to drug shortages, you can’t find the medications even if you’ve got the money to buy them.”
In June as well, Daily NK reported — quoting a source in South Pyongan Province — that students mobilized for the rice planting season complained of abdominal pain after contracting a waterborne disease, but little was done for them due to the lack of medications.
In fact, North Korea suffers from severe water contamination because its decrepit water and sewage facilities do a poor job of processing wastewater. People are also contracting waterborne diseases from the contaminated water, with an especially large number of cases emerging in the hot, humid summer.
According to the voluntary national review (VNR) North Korea submitted to the UN in July 2021, only 60.9% of North Koreans had access to safe drinking water as of 2017.
North Korea cannot sufficiently purify water due to various supply shortages, including the chemicals necessary to disinfect the water supply.
“The state disinfects reservoirs, but due to a lack of chemicals, it just carries out a disinfection by passing the gravel and sand layers through a machine, and even then, because they do it so seldomly, mud comes out when it rains,” the source said. “It’s been ages since the smell of disinfectant came from the tap water.”
In June, North Korean authorities ordered South Pyongan Province to organize a task force to investigate the pollution levels and water quality of rivers and streams near factories to combat the unsanctioned release of industrial wastewater.
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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