“Right now,” Linton told a small group of foreign reporters in Seoul this morning, “we are trying to prevent a disaster.” But if essential drugs are not pre-ordered on the international market in the next three months, the country’s supply will run out by next June. Linton, who returned from his latest trip to North Korea earlier this month, estimated that there are some 130,000 tuberculosis patients being treated in the country at present.
Stephen Linton of the Eugene Bell Foundation, which provides humanitarian assistance to North Korea, is widely considered in Seoul to be the American citizen with the widest access to rural areas of the isolated country, to which he has been traveling for two decades. At a time when questions are being raised in both South Korea and the international community about the seriousness of food conditions in North Korea, a US philanthropist who recently returned from the isolated country warned of a greater danger closing in: a murderous epidemic.
