UNPA, NORTH KOREA—This village in rugged hills 2 hours south
of Pyongyang has had it rough. Last summer, a typhoon wiped out most of its
corn crop, and a second windstorm ripped stone tiles from roofs. Clinging to a
slope facing the settlement, the Unpa tuberculosis (TB) rest home—a tidy gray
concrete building with a red roof—took a battering. None of the staff members
or 46 patients was harmed. But the hurricane-force gales shattered windows of a
ward under construction that will house patients infected with
multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB and sent its steel roof sailing down the valley.
Surveying the damage, Heidi Linton, executive director of Christian Friends of
Korea (CFK), a humanitarian organization based in Black Mountain, North
Carolina, jots down a list of materials that CFK intends to purchase for the
MDR wing. Occasional booms punctuate the stillness: Distant artillery fi re as North
Korea prepares for what it sees as an inevitable military conflict with the
South. As war fever reached a frenzied pitch last month, Linton and six other
Americans were in the countryside with North Korean scientists and physicians,
joining forces against a common enemy: tuberculosis. TB has skyrocketed in the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the past 20 years, according to
the World Health Organization (WHO). Famines in the mid-1990s ignited the
epidemic; chronic malnutrition ever since has added fuel to the fi re. North
Korea now has one of the highest TB incidences outside sub-Saharan Africa.
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