North Korean children are being born without anuses, toes, or hands, as a mysterious illness dubbed ‘ghost disease’ spreads near Kim Jong-un‘s nuke testing site, according to a North Korean defector.
FIRST-HAND TESTIMONY
Youngran Lee, who lived near the Punggye-ri test site before she escaped in 2015 said in a chilling first-hand testimony that a horrifying disease has swept the region, killing and deforming infant children with doctors powerless to diagnose or treat it.
Mrs Lee said: ‘In Kilju County, civilians are suffering from diseases, not knowing why. In hospitals, doctors cannot diagnose it, and the patients are dying slowly with lingering illness.
‘It is not too drastic to say that having a child without an anus, toes, or hands was normalised in Kilju. There are patients with various cancers in every other house.’
MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE HERMIT KINGDOM
The defector shared rare insight into life inside the ‘Hermit Kingdom’, expressing concerns about living so close to a nuclear testing zone. She described her house shaking, furniture falling from the walls as the military tested its weapons.
Mrs Lee counts her only son among the victims of ghost disease.
HEALTH SITUATIONS IN NORTH KOREA
She said that in North Korea, medication supplied by the UN is hoarded by senior government officials, and despite the promise of free healthcare, ‘the shelves are empty in pharmacies’.
So when her son developed a mild fever in October 2014, aged 27, she turned to black market medication, smuggled in from China.
But it failed to help and she took him to hospital.
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She said: ‘A tuberculosis doctor told us that my son had holes in his lungs, measuring as big as 1.5cm and 2.7cm.
‘He also said he did not know why an increasing number of young adults were coming to the hospital.
‘I could not understand why this had happened to my son, and felt so helpless.
‘Furthermore, he had eight close friends, and they were all diagnosed with tuberculosis one by one from 2012, and died within four years.’
