| Home | Red Cross pledges to feed thousands of starving North Koreans posted 6-5-97 Increased food supplies, drugs, and basic medical equipment will be shipped to North Korea to help combat the growing food shortage in the country, which has been decimated by massive flooding the last two years. Michel Tailhades, MD, who recently toured North Korean hospitals, clinics, and schools with an the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IRCRC) team, estimated that up to 20 percent of children under the age of 7 are malnourished and that birth weights of newborns have dropped, indicating pregnant women are also malnourished. "It’s a very, very critical situation," said Marie-Francoise Borel, spokesperson for IRCRC in Geneva, Switzerland. Floods in 1995 and 1996 destroyed stockpiles of food and devastated farmland, resulting in poor harvests the last two years, Borel said. North Korea’s crumbling economy and poor agricultural infrastructure have also contributed to the crisis, she said. The IRCRC is expanding its food distribution program to feed 740,000 people with pledges of 50,000 tons of food aid from Red Cross organizations in Britain, Scandinavia, and South Korea. Supplies of drugs and basic medical equipment such as stethoscopes have been depleted, said Tailhades. "The health system is not able to respond to the needs of the people," he said, and patients are being treated with herbs and roots. "Basically, there was no medicine available in the places we visited."
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