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: Healthcare 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)
“They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide ... ?”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Crimes increase as education, opportunity, and property decrease. Whatever spreads ignorance, poverty and, discontent causes crime.... Criminals have their own responsibility, their own share of guilt, but they are merely the hand.... Whoever interferes with equal rights and equal opportunities is in some ... real degree, responsible for the crimes committed in the community.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)