North Korea's health system has collapsed, with the sick and dying refusing to seek treatment from hospitals equipped only with traditional medicine, the head of an international aid agency said in Hong Kong yesterday. Surgeons are working with soiled robes and dirty cloths to mop wounds, while a shortage of intravenous fluid systems has forced them to feed sugar and water from old beer bottles direct into patients' veins, the director-general of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Mr Eric Goemaere, said.
The deteriorating conditions, combined with poor water quality and a lack of soap, had led to widespread respiratory ailments, skin disorders and diarroheal conditions, he added, speaking after a one-week tour of the isolated Stalinist state.
"There are doctors and buildings, but no aspirin, no anaesthetic, no basic medicines, no soap, no milk and, therefore, no patients," Mr Goemaere said.
"They know they have nothing to offer them.
"The health system in North Korea has collapsed, leaving almost the entire population with no care except for traditional korio herbal medicine."
MSF had sent the hospital and others throughout three provinces of the country basic medical kits, including drugs no longer available in North Korea, but the resource-starved doctors needed to be shown how to use even the most simple drugs, he said.
"They didn't know paracetamol so we had to train them how to use it," he said, adding that the hospital's shelves were full of herbal medicines.
His comments came as North Korea, South Korea, China and the US prepared to sit down for talks in Geneva tomorrow in an effort to end the 50 years of war between North and South.
North Korea has been hit by three years of natural disasters compounded by a crumbling economy, major systemic problems in agriculture and a government paralysed since the death of President Kim Il-Sung in 1994.
Mr Goemaere dismissed talk of famine, but said there was widespread malnutrition and warned that inaction by the international community could see the situation deteriorate further next year.
Much of the country was without power, he said, leaving hospitals and other buildings freezing at temperatures lower than minus 12 C. North Korea's four factories which formerly produced drugs were inactive because of the electricity shortage and the lack of raw materials which were previously supplied by the country's communist bloc allies.
Markets were empty across the country and public transport had ceased operation everywhere but in Pyongyang, Mr Goemaere said, adding that 40 per cent of North Koreans living in the countryside were able to produce small amounts of food to feed themselves.