North Korea Denies Bird Flu Report

I honestly don’t know how Rescue the North Korean People (RENK) would be able to receive reliable information that a North Korean is infected, but it’s interesting that the North Korean regime is now forced to respond to RENK’s reports. As usual, the UN is reduced to echoing the statements of the North Korean government without so much as telling us what access they were granted or denied to the allegedly infected area. The Food and Agriculture Office head who made the statement is also responsible for China, meaning she probably pays relatively little attention to North Korea and almost certainly doesn’t live there. As to the substance of the report, there’s very little evidence on either side.

Note that no one has yet discovered a strain of avian flu that passes from human to human. If that happens, it will be the result of a genetic mutation in the virus. We will know it’s happened when we see a cluster of human cases emerge rapidly in a small area. This is The Big Shoe that has yet to drop. Until that event occurs, your average North Korean is in far greater danger of dying from an unguarded comment about Kim Jong Il’s porcine build in a nominally socialist country with 6.5 million starving people. Which brings us to the plain, old ordinary risk of starvation in a nation so ruthlessly paranoid that it threw out international aid workers in the middle of winter and continues to spend far more on weapons than on food. If you’re a North Korean, odds are avian flu isn’t especially high on your list of worries.

RENK, as you recall, is the group responsible for most of the clandestine videos of North Korea. Note that I’ve added sidebar links to these and other videos, including the public execution, the “resistance” video, videos of famine orphans in the streets, and a clandestine interview with a dying North Korean soldier. Look to the right and scroll down a bit.