European Union to Send Food Aid to North Korea

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

BRUSSELS — Responding to the growing threat of a humanitarian crisis in North Korea, the European Union announced on Monday that it will provide about $14.5 million in emergency aid to feed more than some 650,000 North Koreans.

The bloc’s executive body, the European Commission, said that after its experts witnessed evidence of a developing crisis last month during a mission to North Korea, it negotiated an agreement with the North Koreans about how to monitor the delivery of assistance.

“Increasingly desperate and extreme measures are being taken by the hard-hit North Koreans, including the widespread consumption of grass,” the European Commission said in a statement.

The severity of the situation prompted a switch of tactics by the commission. In 2008, it stopped sending humanitarian aid to North Korea in favor of offering financing for longer-term development projects.

“The purpose of this aid package is to save the lives of at least 650,000 people who could otherwise die from lack of food,” Kristalina Georgieva, a European commissioner, said in the statement. “Our experts saw severely malnourished children in hospitals and nurseries where no treatment was available.

“North Korea’s chronic nutrition problem is turning into an acute crisis in some parts of the country.”

Former President Jimmy Carter and two other former presidents, Mary Robinson of Ireland and Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, and former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway traveled to North Korea in April and issued grave warnings about the food situation there. (All four are members of the Elders, an independent group of world leaders established by Nelson Mandela.)

Mr. Carter was particularly concerned about the refusal of the United States and South Korea to send humanitarian assistance to the North, saying their deliberate withholding of food aid amounted to “a human rights violation.”

Mr. Carter, 86, who was not traveling as an official American envoy, had been invited to North Korea for meetings with senior political and military officials.

Mrs. Robinson echoed Mr. Carter’s concerns about what she called the “very serious crisis” over food supplies in North Korea because of a harsh winter, severe flooding and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. She said the withdrawal of American and South Korean food shipments had aggravated a dire situation, which had become, she said, “a matter of life-and-death urgency.”

The United States recently sent a team of experts to evaluate food and hunger conditions in North Korea. But the Obama administration has not yet decided about a resumption of food shipments.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently that “North Korea must address our serious concerns about monitoring.” Integral to any agreement to restart American aid deliveries, she said, would be “our ability to ensure and monitor that whatever food aid is provided actually reaches the people who are in need.”

After his trip in April, Mr. Carter said North Korean officials had guaranteed to make changes to the aid-distribution system so that Western governments and donors could track their deliveries and be certain that their aid was not being diverted to the military or the ruling elite.

The European aid will be distributed through the World Food Program, which has been used by the United States and other countries and donors. Ms. Georgieva said it would be strictly monitored, from the point of delivery at ports to when it reached recipients.

“If at any stage we discover that the aid is being diverted from its intended recipients, then the commission will not hesitate to end its humanitarian intervention,” she said.

According to the European Commission, its experts found that in North Korea the state-distributed food rations had been more than halved in recent months. Two-thirds of the population depends on the rations, it said.

The per-person ration, which had been 400 grams of cereals per day, about 14 ounces, was reduced to 150 grams, about 5.3 ounces, in June. That is a fifth of the daily average nutritional requirement, according to European experts. Most of the rations consist of corn.

“Food assistance will reach children under 5 who have already been hospitalized with severe acute malnutrition,” the commission said in the statement. “Children in residential care will also be fed, as well as pregnant and breast-feeding women, hospital patients and the elderly.”

The food shortages have been caused by years of economic mismanagement and underinvestment, and have been made worse by poor weather and a reduction of food imports from China and South Korea. The next main grain harvest is in October.

Initially, the North Koreans had planned to import 353,000 tons of grains, but that target was reduced to 220,000 tons, of which about half has been secured so far, European experts said.

The North Korean government has promised unrestricted access for random checks related to the aid, the commission said. While distributing the European aid, the World Food Program will pay 400 visits per month to warehouses, institutions caring for children, hospitals and distribution sites.

Stephen Castle reported from Brussels and Mark McDonald from Seoul, South Korea.

View the original article here

Study in Korea Puts Autism’s Prevalence at 2.6%, Surprising Experts

 

The figure, 2.6 percent of all children aged 7 to 12 in the Ilsan district of the city of Goyang, is more than twice the rate usually reported in the developed world. Even that rate, about 1 percent, has been climbing rapidly in recent years — from 0.6 percent in the United States in 2007, for example.

But experts said the findings did not mean that the actual numbers of children with autism were rising, simply that the study was more comprehensive than previous ones.

“This is a very impressive study,” said Lisa Croen, director of the autism research program at Kaiser-Permanente Northern California, who was not connected with the new report. “They did a careful job and in a part of the world where autism has not been well documented in the past.”

For the study, which is being published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers from the Yale Child Study Center, George Washington University and other leading institutions sought to screen every child aged 7 to 12 in Ilsan, a community of 488,590, about the size of Staten Island.

By contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and most other research groups measure autism prevalence by examining and verifying records of existing cases kept by health care and special education agencies. That approach may leave out many children whose parents and schools have never sought a diagnosis.

In recent years scientists have come to see autism as a spectrum of disorders that can include profound social disconnection and mental retardation, but also milder forms, like Asperger’s syndrome, that are pervasive and potentially disabling but that often go undiagnosed.

“From the get-go we had the feeling that we would find a higher prevalence than other studies because we were looking at an understudied population: children in regular schools,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Young-Shin Kim, a child psychiatrist and epidemiologist at the Yale Child Study Center.

South Korea was chosen not only because autism prevalence had not been measured there, but also because its national health care system, universal education and homogeneous population made it a promising region for a planned series of studies that will also look at genetic and environmental factors in autism.

The study, which was largely financed by the research and advocacy group Autism Speaks, raises the question of whether a similarly high prevalence would be found in the United States if all children were screened.

Dr. Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp, chief of developmental disabilities at the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities of the C.D.C., acknowledged that her agency’s records-based approach probably missed some autistic children — especially among the poor, among racial minorities and “potentially among girls” — and said the agency was interested in taking part in a population-based approach like the Korean study.

“We believe this will be a way to get as complete an estimate of A.S.D. prevalence as possible,” she said in an e-mail, using the abbreviation for autism spectrum disorder.

Most cases of autism spectrum disorder in the Korean study, the researchers said, turned up among children in regular schools who had no record of receiving special education or mental health services. A third were found among a “high-probability group” of 294 children who were attending special-education schools or were listed on a registry of disabled children.

The children in that high-probability group were similar in many ways to children with autism in the United States and elsewhere. Fifty-nine percent were intellectually disabled, or mentally retarded; more than two-thirds had full-blown autism, as opposed to milder forms like Asperger’s; and boys outnumbered girls five to one.

Among the children with autism spectrum disorder in regular schools, only 16 percent were intellectually disabled, more than two-thirds had a milder form of autism, and the ratio of boys to girls was unusually low: 2.5 to 1.

In addition, 12 percent of these children had a superior I.Q. — a higher proportion than found in the general population.

Researchers used a two-step process to identify autism among ordinary schoolchildren: parents and teachers completed a 27-item questionnaire on each child, and children who scored in the autistic range on that questionnaire were individually evaluated.

“If we had only looked at the high-probability group, we would have come up with about 0.7 percent, which is in line with C.D.C. statistics for the U.S.,” said the study’s senior author, Roy Richard Grinker, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University.

The surprisingly large proportion of cases uncovered in ordinary schools, he noted, may in part reflect the low level of awareness and high degree of stigma attached to autism in South Korea. In addition, children with autism spectrum disorders may stand out less in South Korean schools, which follow highly structured and predictable routines and emphasize rote learning.

Other experts said that more “population based” studies, though costly, could help determine how broadly the Korean findings could be generalized to other societies.

Craig J. Newschaffer, chairman of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Drexel School of Public Health in Philadelphia, praised the new report, calling it “quite a strong study,” but he added that the results were based on information about 63 percent of the schoolchildren, a good response rate but not ideal.

“It is just one area of Korea,” he said, “and we know that there’s random variation in how diseases are distributed.”