Famine and Poverty
There are issues in North Korea regarding quality of living which impact negatively on its citizen’s health. For example, only 60% of the population had access to improved sanitation facilities in 2000. During the 1990s, the country was ravaged by famine, causing the death of between 500,000 and 3 million people. Food shortages are ongoing today, with factors such as bad weather, lack of fertilizer and a drop in international donation meaning that North Koreans do not have enough to eat. A study of North Koreans in 2008 found that three-quarters of respondents had reduced their food intake. Extreme poverty is also a factor in the hunger faced by North Korean people, with 27% of the population living at or below the absolute poverty line of less than US $1 a day.
These food shortages cause a number of malnutrition diseases. For example, a 2009 UNICEF report found that North Korea was “one of 18 countries with the highest prevalence of stunting (moderate and severe) among children under 5 years old”. North Korea is also experiencing a tuberculosis epidemic, with 5% of the population infected with the disease; this has been attributed to the “overall deterioration in health and nutrition status of the population as well as the rundown of the public health services”.
Read more about this topic: Health In North Korea
Famous quotes containing the words famine and, famine and/or poverty:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavours with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)