North Korean Economy Watch

According ot the Daily NK:

South Korea has granted permission for an aid shipment of anti-malarial medication, the seventh shipment of aid to North Korea since the Cheonan sinking.

An Ministry of Unification said today, “We have decided to allow a shipment of anti-malarial medication worth $335,000, which was requested by the Korean Sharing Movement.”

Korean Sharing Movement is a well-known aid organization targetting North Korea.

The Korean Sharing Movement says it plans to send malaria diagnosis kits, mosquito nets and vaccines for pregnant women among other things to Jangpung, Geumcheon, Tosan and Kaesong, which are areas of North Korea adjacent to Gyeonggi Province, the province which surrounds Seoul.

Funding for the project has been provided by the government of Gyeonggi Province.

Most previous, post-Cheonan shipments have been aid for infants and children. Earlier this month, two aid consignments of infant-related aid were sent.

The Unification Ministry in Seoul, upon granting permission for the previous shipments, explained, “While South Korea will hold off on inter-Korean business projects on principle, we will continue providing purely humanitarian aid for the weak, such as infants and children.”

Including today’s shipment, the total cost of aid sent since punitive measures against North Korea were announced on May 24 has been approximately $603,000.

The current shipment of anti-malarial medication is being sent, the Ministry of Unification explained today, because malaria has the potential to spread into South Korea during the summer months.

Read the full story here:
Rok to send malaria medication to DPRK
Daily NK
Chris Green
6/24/2010

According to Reuters:

There are no private cars in North Korea and countless factory chimneys have not belched smoke in years, but state media said on Tuesday scientists were inventing new ways to cut air pollution and protect the environment.

The country “has directed a great effort” to research environmental protection, the state news agency KCNA reported.

“Researchers have developed a new material for removing exhaust fumes from automobiles so as to cut the greenhouse gas emissions and reduce air pollution 35-40 percent,” it said, without elaborating.

It also said “units” in the capital, Pyongyang, that caused pollution had been registered, suggesting that dirty industries were under pressure to get clean.

“They are now developing a gas and dust arrester necessary in production processes and new materials needed to secure environmental safety of products,” it said.

The isolated communist country’s state-run media periodically boasts revolutionary innovations in science and technology, despite a moribund economy and chronic food shortages.

Perhaps the most visible in recent years have been related to the relatively well-funded — and well-fed — military. North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests since 2006 and several missile launches, upsetting its neighbours.

North Korean scientists also invented a device using “locally available materials” to incinerate hospital waste, KCNA said, and the Environmental Protection Institute of the Ministry of Land and Environmental Conservation had intensified research into pollution-free vegetable production.

Here is the original KCNA story:

Scientific Achievements of Environmental Protection
 
Pyongyang, June 22 (KCNA) — The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has directed a great effort to scientific researches for environmental protection.

Researchers have developed a new material for removing exhaust fumes from automobiles so as to cut the greenhouse gas emissions and reduce air pollution 35-40 percent.

They have also put the environmental management of industrial establishments on IT basis.

Meanwhile, they have registered units causing environmental pollution in Pyongyang and confirmed methods and procedures for preventing pollution. They are now developing a gas and dust arrester necessary in production processes and new materials needed to secure environmental safety of products.

Besides, they have invented a new device to destroy by fire such wastes from hospitals as contaminated injector and bandage with locally available materials.

Scientists of the Environmental Protection Institute of the Ministry of Land and Environmental Conservation have intensified a research in pollution-free vegetable production.

Read the full Reuters story here:
N.Korea says puts “great effort” into environment
Reuters
6/22/2010

According to CanKor Report #323, 2 June 2010:

North Korea began opening up to nongovernmental organizations in the 1990s, when severe food shortages forced it to seek outside aid. While both the famine of the mid-90s and the efforts to alleviate it got a good deal of press at the time, attention to this aspect of North Korea has fallen off in recent years as most press coverage now deals with the nuclear issues or questions of leadership succession. But while NGO activities may have dropped off over the last decade, a select few groups continue in their efforts to better the lives of ordinary North Koreans, despite all the limitations and difficulties they face in doing so.

CanKor has collected a partial list of nongovernmental organizations from the non-six-party talk countries currently engaged in humanitarian activities in North Korea. While some have been left out at their own request due to the politically sensitive nature of their work, we will endeavour to present regular updates on current or new projects in the DPRK. Readers are encouraged to write in and inform us of any activities we may report.

Featured Project:  Mennonite Central Committee

MCC has been engaged in the DPRK since the mid 1990s, the earlier years through the Canadian Food Grains Bank (CFGB) in partnership with other organizations to support the Food Aid Liaison Unit (FALU), and also together with other non-resident NGOs such as Caritas International, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and Foods Resource Bank/Church of the Brethren Global Foods Crisis Fund to support sustainable agriculture and provide humanitarian assistance. Between 1995 and 2006, approximately $15 million in food and other material resources was sent to the DPRK by MCC.

Since 2006 and the dissolving of FALU, MCC has worked in the DPRK through its MCC NE Asia office. MCC has continued to send food and material resources to orphanages, initially via First Steps, and eventually in direct relationship. Soymilk production equipment was also provided to assist orphanages and soymilk production facilities to increase production of their own nutritional needs. MCC also sends food and material resources to tuberculosis hospitals and rest homes through its partnership with Christian Friends of Korea. Greenhouses have also been provided to enable these facilities to raise more of their own food needs.

Here   is a story on MCC’s partnership with First Steps in sending soybeans to orphanages in the DPRK and

Here   is a story on MCC’s cooperation with Christian Friends of Korea in sending food and other material resources to TB facilities.

Beginning in 2009, MCC is partnering with the Ministry of Agriculture in the DPRK on a three- year food security project. Given the success of conservation agriculture in other climatically-similar districts around the world, including Asia and Canada, this project aims to build longer-term food security at three cooperative farms and surrounding areas by increasing the scale of conservation agriculture practiced on each farm.

This is being done through the provision of technical support, training, specialized equipment and inputs. The program will benefit 12,287 residents on the three project farms. The total budget for the 3-year project is U.S.$1 million, with approximately 75% of the funding provided through CFGB and the remainder through individual donations to MCC. Click here   for a news release about the conservation agriculture project. In the interest of further engagement, MCC has also hosted delegations from the DPRK in both the U.S. and Canada, most recently an agricultural delegation to Canada in the fall of 2008. MCC also looks for ways to advocate DPRK engagement with Canadian and American governments. MCC seeks to share its resources in the name of Christ with those in need, placing emphasis on people-to-people relationships.

CanKor has more on NGOs here.

Geoffrey Cain writes in Time:

Few investors can boast the one-of-a-kind global pedigree of Felix Abt. Since 2002, the Swiss businessman has found his calling as a point man for Western investments in — of all places — North Korea, where he helped found the Pyongyang Business School in 2004. He also presided over the European Business Association in Pyongyang, a group in the capital that acts as a de facto chamber of commerce. A few years ago, that position led him to help set up the first “European Booth” featuring around 20 European companies each year at the Pyongyang Spring International Trade Fair, an annual gathering of 270 foreign and North Korean companies currently underway in the hermit kingdom until Thursday.

Yet Abt, 55, who lives in Vietnam and therefore won’t be attending the trade fair this year, laments the giant cloud hanging over the country: in recent years, political turmoil on the peninsula has raised the stakes even further for doing business in North Korea — even for the country’s main patron, China. Though investors have always faced the prospect of sanctions, he says, the situation has worsened after the United States ratcheted up sanctions on the government in 2006 on allegations that it was counterfeiting U.S. dollars. And in 2006 and 2009 the Kim Jong-il regime tested two small nuclear bombs, prompting heavier sanctions from the United Nations in 2006. Recently, tensions with Seoul have spiked over the March sinking of a South Korean corvette in waters near the North.(See pictures of the rise of Kim Jong-il.)

Those measures hit home for Abt. While he was running a pharmaceutical company in Pyongyang called Pyongsu in the mid-2000s, he learned that the U.N. Security Council had imposed sanctions on certain chemicals — a move that could have forced him to completely stop manufacturing medicine. Thankfully, he adds, he had already secured a large stock of the substance beforehand. “Whatever business you are involved in,” he says, “some day you may find out that some product or even a tiny but unavoidable component is banned by a U.S. or U.N. sanctions because it can, for example, also be used for military purposes.”

Those dilemmas haven’t stopped Abt. In 2007, he co-founded an information technology firm in Pyongyang called Nosotek, whose 50 or so employees design software applications for the iPhone and Facebook. The venture has already seen its share of success: one of its iPhone games ranked first in popularity for a short while on Apple’s Top 10 list for Germany — though he can’t name the software out of concern for protecting his contractors from bad publicity.(See pictures of North Koreans at the polls.)

For some companies, the stigma of a “Made in North Korea” label matters less than the competitive edge gained from having low overhead costs and a diligent workforce whose wages remain less than outsourcing powerhouses like China, Vietnam and India. In the past, North Korea has attracted the interest of multinational corporations looking for cheap labor in fields as diverse as electrical machinery and cartoon animation. Yet few multinationals show their faces at this month’s fair, a decline from the early 2000s when Abt says they were appearing regularly to look for opportunities in electricity, infrastructure, transportation and mining.

Not all foreign ventures in the North are driven by profit margins alone. The 2005 animated Korean movie Empress Cheung, a popular fantasy film drawn jointly by South and North Korean animators, brought attention to the animation industry in North Korea. Nelson Shin, head of the Seoul-based animation studio that started the project, claims he worked with North Korea for a greater cause than cheap labor. “It wasn’t so much because of cost efficiency as because of cultural exchange between the two Koreas,” he says.

For a country so poor, North Korea has churned out a remarkable number of talented engineers and scientists who fuel some of these small sectors (along with its controversial nuclear weapons program). In the 1960s and 1970s, the government pushed the country to become self-sufficient through development projects, a part of its ideology of “Juche” that promotes absolute autonomy from foreign powers. The communist regime of Kim Il-sung prided itself on its universities and public housing system, in particular. “It was an advance from pre-World War II days,” says Helen-Louise Hunter, a former CIA analyst now in Washington, D.C., who researched North Korea during those decades. “Kim Il-sung was genuinely interested in improving his people’s standard of living, and was off to a good start in a couple of areas compared to South Korea in those early days.”

Yet North Korea fell behind after the South’s own military dictators put their country into industrial overdrive throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, depriving North Korea of valuable aid. Then came a famine in the mid-1990s that delivered the final blow, leaving up to 3 million people dead and crippling the capacities of the already isolated state.

Today, the pariah regime of Kim Jong-il is allegedly known to raise money through illicit activities like trafficking narcotics and money laundering. But it’s not known how much those activities figure into the country’s GDP of $28.2 billion in 2009 and its $2 billion worth of exports in 2008, the most recent year data is available. “Not that much income comes from illegitimate operations if you mean drugs and counterfeited dollars,” says Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul. “More come from arms sales, though, but I would not describe this as an illegitimate trade.”

Abt shakes off the image of Pyongyang being the center of a mafia state. He sees himself and other foreign investors as the potential movers and changers of Kim’s hermit regime. “Cornering a country is ethically more questionable than engagement,” he says. “Foreigners engaging with North Koreans are change agents. The North Koreans are confronted with new ideas which they will observe and test, reject or adopt.”

Read the full story here:
Can North Korea Be Safe for Business?
Time
Geoffrey Cain
5/20/2010

According to Reuters (via the Washington Post):

North Korea’s health system would be the envy of many developing countries because of the abundance of medical staff that it has available, the head of the World Health Organization said on Friday.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, speaking a day after returning from a 2-1/2 day visit to the reclusive country, said malnutrition was a problem in North Korea but she had not seen any obvious signs of it in the capital Pyongyang.

North Korea — which does not allow its citizens to leave the country — has no shortage of doctors and nurses, in contrast to other developing countries where skilled healthcare workers often emigrate, she said.

This allows North Korea to provide comprehensive healthcare, with one “household doctor” looking after every 130 families, said the head of the United Nations health agency, praising North Korea’s immunization coverage and mother and child care.

“They have something which most other developing countries would envy,” Chan told a news conference, noting that her visit was a rare sign of the communist state’s willingness to cooperate with outside agencies.

Chan’s comments marked a significant change from the assessment of her predecessor, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who said in 2001 that North Korea’s health system was near collapse.

Chan, who acknowledged that countries that she visits always try to look good while pointing to where they need help, met a series of North Korean officials, visited several hospitals, and also talked to Pyongyang-based diplomats, United Nations officials and representatives of the Red Cross.

The authorities acknowledge there is a problem with malnutrition, she said, but things have become better since famine in the 1990s and a series of natural disasters in 2001.

“Nutrition is an area that the government has to pay attention (to) and especially for pregnant women and for young children,” Chan said.

NO SIGNS OF OBESITY

Chan spent most of her brief visit in Pyongyang, and she said that from what she had seen there most people had the same height and weight as Asians in other countries, while there were no signs of the obesity emerging in some parts of Asia.

But she said conditions could be different in the countryside.

News reports said earlier this year that North Koreans were starving to death and unrest was growing as last year’s currency revaluation caused prices to soar.

Chan, who described her visit as “technical and professional” — in other words avoiding politics — said the North Korean government’s readiness to work with international agencies, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, was encouraging.

The Global Fund requires countries it works with to provide sound data, account for resources contributed and allow access by officials, she noted.

“I can confirm that at least in the area of health the government is receptive to engagement with international partners,” she said.

“They are receptive to requests for increasing transparency — have a better quality data — and being held accountable for the resources flowing into the country to improve health.”

North Korea, whose human rights record has been strongly condemned by U.N. experts, is refusing to return to six-party talks about its nuclear program, which has led to U.N. sanctions being imposed after a nuclear test in May last year.

Tension is increasing with South Korea, with which the North fought a war in 1950-53, after the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel last month for which Seoul increasingly suspects Pyongyang.

But Chan praised a joint project between North and South Korea to improve women’s and children’s health, which she said was promoting dialogue and trust between the two rivals.

Last month, the WHO said North Korea has reduced deaths from surgery and among women in childbirth under the South Korea-funded program.

The Wall Street Journal calls out Ms. Chan:

Greetings, comrades. World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan has returned from Pyongyang with wonderful news. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is making great strides in health care, with one “household doctor” for every 130 households. Thanks to on-the-spot guidance from Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, North Korean doctors selflessly choose not to emigrate and have even conquered the decadent West’s problem of obesity!

All right, we exaggerate. But only the part about the Dear Leader. Ms. Chan’s surreal statements last Friday, as reported by several wire services, really did include praise for North Korean health care and the lack of obesity. “They have something which most other developing countries would envy,” the global health administrator gushed. In her guided tours, she saw few signs of malnutrition, and the people in Pyongyang were the same height and weight as other Asians.

That’s hardly consistent with the reports of other visitors, or the accounts of North Koreans fleeing starvation—a trend on the upswing again after a poor harvest and harsh winter. Even Ms. Chan’s predecessor described the North’s health-care system as near collapse in 2001, and since then the North has continued to depend on foreign aid to feed one-third of its population. As for the abundance of doctors, the North’s declaration on the WHO website ought to arouse suspicion: “During the period 2001-2003, the number of doctors was increased by 104 percent, the nurses 125 percent and the midwives 107 percent.”

It appears Ms. Chan is either winking at the reality to maintain contact with the North or she allowed herself to be fooled. Her own organization’s doctors have described appalling conditions in North Korean hospitals, such as the lack of running water and electricity.

But then this is nothing new for the WHO. In the 1970s, the United Nations agency promoted Mao Zedong’s vision of “barefoot doctors” to serve the rural poor—even as China’s health-care system was collapsing, along with the rest of society, under the strain of the Cultural Revolution. Today the WHO has become a cheerleader for Cuban health care. As long as a totalitarian state gives plenty of poorly trained people the title of doctor, fudges its health statistics and takes visiting officials on tours of Potemkin hospitals, the U.N. seems happy to give its seal of approval.

Ms. Chan’s testimony can be read here.

Hat tip to a reader.

Read the full story here:
North Korea has plenty of doctors: WHO
Reuters
Jonathan Lynn
4/30/2010

UPDATE:  According to the Associated Press (Via Washinton Post):

North Korea formally launched a medical videoconference network Tuesday aimed at giving smaller, rural hospitals access to specialists in the capital Pyongyang with the help of the World Health Organization.

WHO has been providing cameras, computers and other equipment to North Korea to help the reclusive, impoverished country connect a main hospital in Pyongyang with medical facilities in 10 provinces. The system is designed to allow doctors to talk to each other to provide additional services to rural patients.

On Tuesday, North Korean health officials and visiting WHO Director-General Margaret Chan held the formal inaugural ceremony for the system at the Kim Man Yu hospital in Pyongyang, according to footage from broadcaster APTN.

“This is an excellent vision because it meets the needs of the government,” Chan said.

Chan, clad in a white gown, later tested the system by talking with provincial doctors via video link.

One unidentified doctor at Jagang province, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Pyongyang, told Chan he is satisfied with the system because it’s too far for his patients to visit specialists in the capital.

She arrived in Pyongyang on Monday, becoming the U.N. agency’s first chief to visit the communist country since 2001.

…

WHO opened its office in Pyongyang in 2001 and has coordinated the purchase of medical equipment and supplies for North Koreans. The world’s health body says on its Web site that it is currently focusing on strengthening the North’s health infrastructure.

ORIGINAL POST: According to the Associated Press (via Taiwan News):

World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan arrived in North Korea on Monday on a rare visit to the isolated country.

The U.N. body has said Chan will spend two days in the reclusive communist country _ the first chief to go since 2001 _ to tour health facilities and meet the country’s health minister.

The WHO has not provided details of Chan’s itinerary, but the Korean Central News Agency said in a dispatch that Chan arrived in Pyongyang on Monday.

The dispatch said the government held a reception for Chan, who arrived the same day as Red Cross and Red Crescent officials. It was not clear if the visits were connected.

The North faces chronic food shortages and has relied on outside assistance to feed much of its population since a famine believed to have killed as many as 2 million people in the 1990s.

Malnutrition, dysentery, and vitamin and iodine deficiency are believed to pose serious risks among children in the country, which also faces a shortfall of hospitals and lacks an efficient state health care system.

Read the full stories here:
WHO chief arrives in North Korea on rare visit
Associate Press (Taiwan Times)
4/26/2010

NKorea launches telemedicine network with WHO help
Associated Press (via Washinton Post)
Kim Hyung-Jin
4/27/2010

According to Yonhap (3/9/2010):

South Korea’s Red Cross said it will send 20 tons of powdered skim milk to North Korea on Wednesday as part of humanitarian aid to the impoverished neighbor.

The aid worth 156 million won (US$137,000) will be delivered on two 11-ton trucks across the inter-Korean border and unloaded in the border town of Kaesong, the Red Cross said in a release.

In January, North Korea accepted a proposal by the South to provide powdered milk along with other types of aid as humanitarian assistance.

Photo in the Hankyoreh.

According to the Associated Press (via the Washington Post):

North Koreans are getting better medical treatment as the result of a joint program between the two Koreas that has trained thousands of doctors, provided modern equipment and renovated hospitals, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

Maternal mortality has declined by over 20 percent since 2005, and diarrhea cases and deaths in operations have also dropped, said Dr. Eric Laroche.

The World Health Organization has helped in the wide-ranging program, which started in 2006 and is funded by South Korea. It has cost a total of $30.2 million so far.

The program has trained more than 6,000 doctors and nurses in emergency obstetric care, newborn care and child illnesses, said Laroche, who assessed its progress in a four-day visit to North Korea.

The specialization marks a change in health strategy in North Korea, which has about 90,000 family doctors who care for about 130 families each, according to Laroche.

“They know each family one by one,” he said. But, he added, “they’re extremely keen to be trained.”

…

Laroche said hospital staff have been trained in hygiene and clinics have received better material for operations, blood transplants and other medical interventions.

Numerous hospitals have been renovated, and material has also been distributed to 1,200 rural clinics.

Between 2007 and 2009, the number of patients dying in operations fell 73.4 percent, said Laroche, citing a study by the University of Melbourne.

He declined to give an overall view of the health system in the isolated communist nation. But he said services were well-spread among cities and communities.

Read the full article here:
WHO: Korean cooperation boosting health in north
Associated Press (via Washington Post)
Elaine Engler
3/4/2010

UPDATE: Some additional informtaion from Paul Costello:

Stanford researcher Sharon Perry PhD, an infectious disease specialist, has been working in North Korea with a team of American health specialists to develop the country’s first diagnostic laboratory to test drug-resistant tuberculosis. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the hermit country is formally known, witnessed a resurgence of TB in the 1990s after famines plagued the country.

The TB Diagnostics Project is being led by the Bay Area TB Consortium, which Perry directs, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington nonprofit group working to strengthen global security. The program came about after a team of North Korean health officials visited California and met with Stanford and Bay Area tuberculosis experts in 2008.

It’s unusual for any outsiders to visit North Korea, but extremely rare for Americans. Safe to say that it’s an unprecedented partnership between U.S. researchers and health officials in North Korea. So far, Perry has ventured there three times and is soon to return for a fourth visit.

I spoke with Perry for a 1:2:1 podcast about her work in North Korea. It’s a candid, revealing interview that pulls back the curtain a bit from this most mysterious nation. I found it fascinating to hear Perry describe the work there and talk about collaborating with officials from the Ministry of Health on this significant health crisis for the nation. The porous nature of geographical borders and the ability of disease to spread easily from one country to another clearly illustrates that we’re one planet and all in this together.

ORIGINAL POST: According to the New York Times:

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.

Read the full article here:
Tuberculosis: North Korea Develops TB Laboratory With Help From American Doctors
New York Times
Donald McNeil, Jr.
3/1/2010

According to Yonhap:

South Korea said Tuesday it will send 1 billion won (US$866,000) worth of hand sanitizer next week to North Korea to help the impoverished neighbor combat the spread of the H1N1 flu virus.

The shipment of 200,000 liters of sanitizer, scheduled for next Monday, comes after South Korea delivered some $15 million in anti-viral medications to the North in December in the first state-level cross-border humanitarian aid in nearly two years.

North Korea first acknowledged cases of Influenza A virus infection on Dec. 9, but it has yet to report any flu-related deaths.

The hand sanitizer will be transported to the North Korean border town of Kaesong on South Korean trucks across the military demarcation line and handed to the North there, Unification Ministry spokesman Chun Hae-sung said.

“North Korea agreed to accept the aid on Feb. 22,” he told reporters, adding about 20 25-ton trucks will likely be mobilized to deliver the aid.

The Tamiflu aid in December marked the first humanitarian assistance provided by the South Korean government to North Korea since conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office in Seoul in early 2008. Lee cut off the unconditional aid that his liberal predecessors had shipped to the North over the past decade, conditioning exchanges on progress in the North’s denuclearization.

Read the full story here:
S. Korea to deliver anti-viral sanitizer to N. Korea next week
Yonhap
2/16/010

UPDATE: The shipment has been delivered

SKorea sends 2nd batch of swine flu aid to NKorea
AP via Business Week
2/23/2010

South Korean trucks have crossed the border into North Korea to deliver a second batch of swine flu aid.

Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo says South Korea sent 52,840 gallons (200,000 liters) of hand sanitizers to North Korea on Tuesday.

South Korea sent enough doses of the antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza for 500,000 North Koreans in December in its first direct humanitarian aid to the communist country in nearly two years. North and South Korea have remained in a state of war since 1953.

North Korea acknowledged in December that swine flu had broken out in the country though hasn’t mentioned any virus-related deaths.

Tamiflu is made by Switzerland’s Roche Group. Relenza is a procuct of GlaxoSmithKline.