No Person in North Korea has AIDS?

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Dreadsox

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N. Korea, 'only country on earth' free of AIDS, expells
27 foreigners



Special to World Tribune.com
EAST-ASIA-INTEL.COM
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
SEOUL – North Korea has expelled 27 foreigners it said tested positive for HIV and claimed the country remains free of AIDS.

North Korea is "the only country on the earth that has no AIDS-related patients," South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported quoting North Korea's Pyongyang Time. Yonhap reported the magazine in Pyongyang carried an interview with Han Kyong-Ho, director of Pyongyang's Central Hygienic and Anti-Epizootic Center in its Dec. 4 issue.

In the interview, Han said that more than 400,000 people have been tested for AIDS since 1989, and that none other than the 27 foreigners was found to have the disease.

"Those 27 foreigners were sent home at their request," Han said. He did not elaborate on the period of time in which the disease was allegedly discovered and when the foreigners were expelled or to which nations they went.

Han attributed the non-existence of AIDS patients in North Korea to the "sound and moral lifestyle" of North Korean people.

Many North Korean statements are impossible to confirm independently and objectively, to health officials in South Korea say. "WHO [World Health Organization] reports every year that there is no AIDS patient reported from North Korea, but the international health organization has no way to confirm the report," said Koh Eun-A, an official at the AIDS & Tuberculosis Section of the National Institute of Health in Seoul.
 
Bull. I know that the borders are ridiculously tight, but by now North Korea must have "repatriated" somebody from China or someplace else who managed to contract the virus.
 
Yeah, it's probably a lot more efficient than having them deported.
 
Somebody once posted that Cuba quarantined people with it back when the epidemic first started and they now have hardly any cases either. There was a time here in the US when there were only a few hundred people who had it. I know it's not American to do something like that but if those few people had been contained and the spread stopped think of all the MILLIONS of lives worldwide that would have been saved.
 
U2Kitten said:
Somebody once posted that Cuba quarantined people with it back when the epidemic first started and they now have hardly any cases either. There was a time here in the US when there were only a few hundred people who had it. I know it's not American to do something like that but if those few people had been contained and the spread stopped think of all the MILLIONS of lives worldwide that would have been saved.

I think it may have been a wise idea, but I've read in a few sources that HIV may not have one single origin. If it did, I believe that would be West Africa, so containing the virus in the States would not have slowed the spread in the most heavily infected regions of the world.

Is it known where the emergence of HIV in humans took place?

Many people now assume that because HIV has apparently developed from a form of SIV found in a type of chimpanzee in West Africa, that is was actually in West Africa that HIV first emerged in humans. It is then presumed that HIV spread from there around the world.

However, as discussed above, chimpanzees are not necessarily the original source of HIV and it is likely that the virus crossed over to humans on more than one occasion.2 So it is quite possible that HIV emerged at the same time in say both South America and Africa, or that it even emerged in the Americas before it emerged in Africa.

http://www.avert.org/origins.htm
 
I find it really hard to believe that any country in the world is completely AIDS-free. Could they just be playing some international denial game here? It wouldn't surprise me if they were just plain being dishonest about it.
 
U2Kitten said:
Somebody once posted that Cuba quarantined people with it back when the epidemic first started and they now have hardly any cases either. There was a time here in the US when there were only a few hundred people who had it. I know it's not American to do something like that but if those few people had been contained and the spread stopped think of all the MILLIONS of lives worldwide that would have been saved.

LivLuvAndBootlegMusic said:
I think it may have been a wise idea, but I've read in a few sources that HIV may not have one single origin. If it did, I believe that would be West Africa, so containing the virus in the States would not have slowed the spread in the most heavily infected regions of the world.

This type of thinking is really scary. Hard to believe that rational people can honestly think like this. I think it's disgusting.
 
Can't really doubt it completely, but I'm going to say that U2kitten had an interesting point. I don't want to officially take sides as of now, but it seems like it could be a strange debate between morality and saving millions of lives?
 
No, there are ways to prevent the disease from spreading without interning all the sufferers - to lock people up because they are sick is the action of despots, and it is wrong.
 
A_Wanderer said:
No, there are ways to prevent the disease from spreading without interning all the sufferers - to lock people up because they are sick is the action of despots, and it is wrong.
I don't find it moral at all either, but how can it be prevented?
 
Active use of condoms, widespread education about the risks and the facts of the matter (i.e. raping virgins does not cure it).
 
indra said:




This type of thinking is really scary. Hard to believe that rational people can honestly think like this. I think it's disgusting.

Ah, I quite expected a comment like this. Is it any more 'disgusting' than millions of people dead all over the world who could have been saved? Inconveniencing a few for the good of millions of others is a bad thing? What about the way TB patients were put in sanitariums in the early part of this century? What about leper colonies? And aren't TB and lepresy a lot less common than they used to be? Millions of lives, gay, straight, old, young, male and female, from millionaire movie stars to the poorest person in a mud hut could have been saved. That's what's scary, and sad.
 
A_Wanderer said:
No, there are ways to prevent the disease from spreading without interning all the sufferers - to lock people up because they are sick is the action of despots, and it is wrong.

What do you suggest in cases of whooping cough and the like? A guy at a job I was temping with last week was diagnosed with it and he was immediately escorted off the premises once he got off the phone. His doctor was legally required to report it to the department of infectious diseases, and his wife, who had also caught it (and was a cashier in a coles supermarket :eek: ) had to be 'voluntarily' quarantined as well.

Is that as bad?

Or is it because HIV and AIDS has other social stigmas attached to it that this is a problem?

I'm not sure where I'm going here as I dont know whether locking up everyone who suffers a contagious disease is the best option either, it just seems we as a society have a double standard. No one wants to be near a colleague who has a bad cold...same with anything regardless of how it's spread.
 
Something like whoping cough is contageous and airborne, HIV and AIDS are spread through sex - there is a big difference between the two.
 
Angela Harlem said:


What do you suggest in cases of whooping cough and the like?

We're only talking about things that are incurable and mostly fatal here, come on, not colds, flu, etc. Sheeesh.

Or is it because HIV and AIDS has other social stigmas attached to it that this is a problem?

I think THIS is why those of you who have a problem with this idea do so, you're thinking it's discrimination. But think of all the other gays, IV drug users and hookers who also died because this problem wasn't contained. Also think how no one ever had a problem with TB sufferers being put in sanitariums. Why is that, because they come from all demographic groups so it wasn't seen as discriminatory. I had a couple relatives in the past who were put in sanitariums. The brother of the last Tsar of Russia was put in one and died there. There was no discrimination, it was only for the good of the public health. They were comfortable and well cared for, not treated like prisoners.
 
U2Kitten said:
Somebody once posted that Cuba quarantined people with it back when the epidemic first started and they now have hardly any cases either. There was a time here in the US when there were only a few hundred people who had it. I know it's not American to do something like that but if those few people had been contained and the spread stopped think of all the MILLIONS of lives worldwide that would have been saved.

I think that, once a person was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and the real severity of the disease was known, quarantining was of no use. Most abstained from having sex so as to not infect their partner(s). I think HIV was spread more by people who did not know they had it. And you can't contain them, because you don't know you have to contain them.

C ya!

Marty
 
U2k, why are you patronising me? I didn't agree nor disagree with quarantine. I'm merely pointing out that we accept it readily in some cases but not others.
 
U2Kitten said:
We're only talking about things that are incurable and mostly fatal here, come on, not colds, flu, etc. Sheeesh.

How much do you know of the whooping cough?
I know what a cough is, but had never heard of a whooping cough, so I looked it up on Google. One of the first results was this:
http://kidshealth.org/parent/infections/bacterial_viral/whooping_cough.html

Pertussis, also known as whooping cough, is an infection of the respiratory system caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis (or B. pertussis). It's characterized by severe coughing spells that end in a "whooping" sound when the person breathes in. Before a vaccine was available, pertussis killed 5,000 to 10,000 people in the United States each year.

While it isn't incurable anymore, I wouldn't put it in the same category as an ordinary cold or flu.

C ya!

Marty
 
All I know is it used to kill babies who got it, and these days is serious enough to warrant being reported to the dept of infectious diseases, like I said. No, not your regular cough. Still, we quarantine the sufferers. We dont bat an eye. "It's for our own good". And it is.
Still we baulk at HIV and AIDS sufferers.
:shrug:
 
Angela Harlem said:
All I know is it used to kill babies who got it, and these days is serious enough to warrant being reported to the dept of infectious diseases, like I said. No, not your regular cough. Still, we quarantine the sufferers. We dont bat an eye. "It's for our own good". And it is.
Still we baulk at HIV and AIDS sufferers.
:shrug:

I think one of the differences in the containment is that for the whooping couch the containment is temporary (isn't it?). While quarantaining those with HIV/AIDS would mean they would be contained for the rest of their life.
 
Yeah it's temporary. And true on HIV/AIDS being for the remainder of their lives. I dont think there's any easy way of getting on top of it, really. We'll never allow containment for the sufferers of it and education has so far to go.
 
U2Kitten is right about people kept in TB sanatoriums at the beginning of the twentieth century. A building which is now a house but used to be a TB sanatorium a hundred years ago is about two blocks away from our house, we live in one of the "older" sections of town. The difference is that TB is ten times as contagious as AIDS is. You could pick up TB by casual contact, and because they didn't have antibiotics in those days, once you caught it you were toast. Still, I don't see anything wrong with having, perhaps, houses set aside for AIDS patients, nice houses with people working in them to take case of the patients. There would be recreation as recreational therapy is nothing new, as well as therapeutic stuff. This is done in Gheel, Belgium, for psychiatric patients. It's where the Catholic Shrine of St. Dymphna is, she is our patron saint of mental and neurological diseases, and it's supposed to be the best psychiatric facility in the world. People go there by choice, not by coercion. Why not use this as a model for treating AIDS, helping the patients and protecting the population?
 
Popmartijn said:


I think one of the differences in the containment is that for the whooping couch the containment is temporary (isn't it?). While quarantaining those with HIV/AIDS would mean they would be contained for the rest of their life.

Excellent point. It's too damned early in the morning for me to think straight. :wink: They would only keep the patients in the TB sanatorium until they either recuperated or died. The disease was a killer. I do not know what the average length of stay in a sanatorium was, I don't know anything about their record-keeping practices and there's no way those records would still be around.
 
Angela H.- It is hopeless to contain it now, of course. I was talking about if it had been done back in the early 80's when only a few people had it. I do agree education is the best hope now, especially in Africa. Education and safe sex have helped a lot in the US.

Verte- thanks, good points!

Popmartjin- as a mother of 3 kids, I know all about Whooping Cough (pertussis) and its dangers. Unforutunately, there has been controversy over the vaccines, some people claim they have caused the kids to have seizures, some that left kids paralyzed or retarded. They say if your kid has an adverse reaction not to give them any more shots. One of mine had a high fever and shaking spell, and is excused from the vacccine even by the school. But this is a disease that is not nearly common enough these days to ever bring about sanitariums! It is rarely fatal except in some cases of very small babies or those already sick.

One more thing about quarentine-the 'big' (not German or rubella) measles were nearly wiped out by the 1970's thanks to vaccinations. But somehow they started to make a small comeback in the 90's. Once I saw on the news, and this was just a few years ago, that there was a major outbreak at LSU and that NO STUDENTS WERE ALLOWED TO GO HOME FOR BREAK to keep it from being spread around the country. This was not just the infected students but all who had been in contact with them, just to be sure. Think of all the hundreds who may have been exposed, and how the disease could have made a major comeback if it was not contained. It has since been discovered that some of the earlier shots were not lifetime immunity and those who got their shots before 1970 should have boosters.
 
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