North Koreans turn to squid soup to ward against Mers virus

Residents embrace traditional remedies amid doubts over the state health system’s ability to cope with a potential outbreak of virus. Daily NK reports

Workers disinfect a subway train carriage in Seoul. Amid fears of a spread across the border, DPRK citizens are turning to their own cures and remedies. Photograph: Yonhap/AFP/Getty Images

Choi Song Min for Daily NK, part of the North Korea network-Tuesday 30 June 2015

While the North Korean authorities step up efforts to ward off the Mers outbreak, residents distrustful of the state’s ability to contain the disease are turning to traditional remedies.

“These days, citizens are applying various preventative measures in order to deal with Mers, [the infection] rampant in South Korea,” a source from South Hamgyong Province said.

Though there have been no reported cases north of the border yet, the DPRK has taken rigorous steps to block the virus, including bulk-testing citizens and quarantining of all foreign goods.

“There has been a lot of active awareness campaigning along with prevention measures all across the country,” a source in South Pyongan Province reported.

“It’s not only provincial, city, and county hospitals, but small local clinics that are carrying out daily tests on residents.”

The virus has claimed 32 lives in South Korea during the recent outbreak.

Recently, North Korean chemists claimed to have found a cure for the respiratory disease, based on ginseng and rare earth metals. But residents have been turning to another “cure”, which they say has been tried and tested during previous epidemics in the country.

“Squid was effective in treating paratyphoid [enteric fever], which wreaked havoc on North Korea a decade ago, and there are many who are seeking it out again,” the source from South Hamkyung explained.

“The citizens think that squid will be just as effective to treat Mers because the state cited fever as one of the affliction’s main symptoms – just like paratyphoid.”

Paratyphoid is an acute infectious disease caused by bacteria known as Salmonella enterica. When it swept through the DPRK in 2006, eating boiled squid from the East Sea became known as a miracle cure, and was thought to put patients on the fast track to recovery and help regain appetite.

Given that many residents have lost faith in the state’s crumbing medical system, many are prepared to devise their own methods to cope with medical threats.

“Citizens cannot get medicine, even when various infectious diseases spread. So they actively use these folk remedies rather than listening to the authorities,” she explained, adding that the East Sea is replete with squid, bringing relief to many who feel the stuff will help them combat a potential infiltration of Mers.

She conceded that there is absolutely no “scientific evidence pointing to how a salty, boiled soup of squid is effective in curing infectious diseases that entail high fever, vomiting, and diarrhoea”.

Universal healthcare was one of the North Korean state’s founding commitments to its people, but hospitals in the country are said to have have deteriorated badly, with some believing that sanctions are contributing to the problem.

It’s now thought that the DPRK routinely struggles to combat diseases such as tuberculosis, and respiratory infections are among its most common causes of death,according to the World Health Organisation.

Last year North Korea shut out foreign tourists for six months with some of the world’s strictest Ebola controls, even though no cases of the disease were reported anywhere near the country, before lifting the restrictions earlier this year.