North Korea Develops TB Lab With Help From American Docs
With help from scientists from Stanford University’s medical school, North Korea has developed its first laboratory capable of detecting drug-resistant tuberculosis, scientists involved in the project said last week. Tuberculosis surged in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea during the famines of the 1990s. (Starvation suppresses the immune system, allowing latent infections to grow.) But the country cannot tell which cases are susceptible to which antibiotics, meaning more dangerous strains could push out strains that are easier to kill, as has happened in Russia and Peru.
The project began after John W. Lewis, an expert on Chinese politics at Stanford participating in informal diplomatic talks over North Korea’s nuclear threat, realized how serious a TB problem the country had. In 2008, doctors from North Korea’s health ministry visited experts in the San Francisco Bay area. Last month, a Stanford team began installing the new diagnostics lab at a hospital in the capital, Pyongyang.
The project “represents an unprecedented level of cooperation” between North Korean and American doctors, Professor Lewis said. It is supported by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit global security group led by former Senator Sam Nunn, Democrat of Georgia, and by Christian Friends of Korea, a humanitarian group.
Although it will soon be able to grow and test TB strains, North Korea right now has none of the more expensive antibiotics that attack drug-resistant TB, said Sharon Perry, the epidemiologist leading the Stanford team. Without outside help it will also run out of routine first-line antibiotics by July, she said.
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/health/02glob.html?ref=health
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Ethical questions
I wonder if it is ethical to diagnose drug resistant TB when there are absolutely no treatment options available. As the government has no drugs to treat it, what will do they with these patients? If the isolation of MDR patients in South Africa is both medically wrong and an abuse of human rights, what North Korea will do to them will probably be also criminal. Perhaps before the MDR kills them, the government will.
Brief background
Millions of people faced the worst food shortages since the late 1990s. Thousands continued to cross the border into China, mainly for food and economic reasons. Those arrested and forcibly repatriated were subjected to forced labour, torture and other ill-treatment in prison camps. Other widespread violations of human rights persisted, including politically motivated and arbitrary use of detention and executions, and severe restrictions on freedoms of expression and movement. Independent human rights monitors continued to be denied access to the country.
http://report2009.amnesty.org/en/regions/asia-pacific/north-korea