I'm quite certain the tabloid article is sensationalist and probably made up out of whole cloth.
However, I'll also add that much of the global south is deeply poor. Parasites and similar problems remain extremely common in India, for example. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people still dealt with that in the DPRK. Especially people who may have been living in the wilderness for days or weeks. Heck, if you drank river water in the frickin Rocky Mountains, it'd be like 50-50 whether you ended up with parasites.
I hike and backpack frequently and I always take water filtration or purification with me. Drinking mountain water will give you giardia.
Mountain water has giardia because ranchers don't range their cattle properly and backpackers can't be bothered to walk away from lakes to shit. Giardia is a parasite of civilization.
no one's claiming the mountains are immoral for having unclean water just that it's not safe to drink the water
It's still way safer to drink mountain water than like, water in a park though, get it? The wilderness isn't dirty, agriculture and tourism are dirty.
The wilderness isn’t dirty
No, i assure you the wilderness is absolutely disgusting. Parasites are a problem across vast swaths of the world. There are all kinds of poorly researched tropical diseases. North America has ticks that will bite you and cause all kinds of horrific auto-immune diseases. Nature wants to kill you and consume your biomass and it is not shy about it.
They absolutely are, but they're a problem in cities too! The only exception is if you have regular access to filtered water and hand washing, which is a huge if. With the exception of western cities, wild areas are far cleaner than ones impacted by agriculture, sedentism and industry.
Heck, if you drank river water in the frickin Rocky Mountains, it’d be like 50-50 whether you ended up with parasites.
I have drunk so much mountain lake water and am okay. That's not to say I don't have parasites, just that they're chill parasites.
Might want to get a broad spectrum anti-parasite drug next time you go to the doctor and/or vet's office.
does anyone else remember that article from a few months back where an MRI revealed that some chinese guy was chock full of parasites in all of his muscles, organs and like half his brain because he refused to stop earing raw pork?
edit: I just googled it and apparently those images have been going around for years but it came back to :reddit-logo: last month. Was literally a repost from 2016
I remember when people were shitting their pants over the fact that NK soldiers shot the defector (who was part of the military) because that’s proof of human rights abuses lol
Do they not know how the military works? I don’t know a single military force in the world that allows defection without the punishment of either life in prison or death. Even non state forces will kill you if you betray them.
"[Chelsea] Manning was charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, which was the most serious charge and could have resulted in a death sentence."
That said, I oppose the death penalty and also take issue with extrajudicial killing. I'm fine criticizing DPRK on that front while also acknowledging that every other country in the world has done the same or worse.
That’s callled a “heart” and a “brain”
Not shocking they were found to be unusual, they are rare things to find under capitalism
rule #1: it's always projection
Okay, so what sorts of body horrors are they inflicting on us now? Are they lacing the tapwater with parasites?
I don't remember if I read it here but there was a dude who was riddled with cancer but when they biopsied it it had no human DNA. Dude had a tapeworm and the tapeworm had cancer and that's what spread (he was also massively immunocompromised, late stage AIDS maybe)
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2015/november/tumours-consisting-of-tapeworm-cancer-cells-found-in-human.html for the irl tapeworm guy.
The pilot of house had that crazy worm infestation but yeah that absolutely would've made an episode. But house was off the air in 2012 and this guy had a diagnosis in 2013, I guaruntee that's the only reason they didn't have it.
This is the plot of The Host but projected onto DPRK
Watch The Host if you haven’t
Whoa, wild how the doctor from Occupied Korea with three TV shows based on him keeps finding all this wacky stuff on the regular.
(Lee Cook Jong, if you want to look him up.)
I don't know why they took him to a surgeon if some strange creatures were just pestering him with pithy wordplay and brain teasers
