The Ebola panic has been pretty widespread, definitely prevalent in the U.S., despite the low number of cases, but a proper demonstration of paranoia comes straight from North Korea.
Not only did the country recently shut down borders to everyone and force 21-day quarantine to any new arrivals, they now claim that the United States is behind the whole outbreak. Top Pyongyang officials appear to believe that the outbreak began as a biological weapon.
In an article published by the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) last week, Hong Sun Gwang, vice president of North Korea’s State Sanitary Inspection Board, asserted that the United States — “kingpin of human rights abusers in the world” — was behind the spread of Ebola. The article said that “an aide to ex-U.S. President Reagan” had “disclosed in an article that the United States developed a progenitor of Ebola virus at bio-weapon institutes built in West African countries for the purpose of launching a biological warfare.”
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
Although it isn’t entirely clear, only a last name published in the KCNA piece, economist Paul Craig Roberts seems to be the “aide.” Just in October, Roberts posted a blog called “Is The US Government The Master Criminal Of Our Time?” which doesn’t exactly demonstrate his history as an employee of the government, it actually highlights writings published online about Ebola by two academics working in America: Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois and Cyril Broderick, who teaches at Delaware State University.
Boyle, a law professor, seems to believe that the current Ebola outbreak strain is man-made and must have escaped from a U.S.-run laboratory in Sierra Leone and that it is now part of a coverup. “I think the people at the top know,” Boyle told the Daily Telegraph. “Probably Obama too.”
Conspiracy theories are indeed at play, but for North Korea, there is an agenda. Since the beginning of this year, Pyongyang has been fighting back against a United Nations report on North Korean human rights abuses, which concluded that the country’s abuses were “without any parallel in the contemporary world.”
As a result, North Korea is pointing out what they believe to be issues in the U.S., and in the KCNA article they focused on Ebola but also made sure to point out the Michael Brown case in Ferguson and Tamir Rice in Cleveland.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“The facts clearly show that the U.S. is the worst tundra of human rights to be condemned by the world people,” KCNA concluded.
[Photo from flickr user U.S. Army RDECOM]
