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North Korea: Send Us Your Expired Medication NewsMax.com Wires SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea has appealed to the South for donations of its medicines that have passed expiration dates, officials said Wednesday, in a sign of desperate health conditions in the impoverished communist country. "We, North Korea, lack many medicines. Instead of destroying medicines that passed expiration dates, we ask South Korea to send them to the North," the North's Red Cross said in a February plea to a private South Korean institute that studies North Korean affairs. The JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported on the North's plea Wednesday. Officials from the South Korea-based Institute for Peace Affairs and Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association confirmed the letter. The North also said it would assume responsibility in case of problems in using medicines that are up to a year past expiration, said Sohn Hyun-soo, deputy head of the Institute for Peace Affairs. But Sohn said the institute, affiliated with the South's Unification Ministry, has informed North Korea that Seoul cannot provide old medicines to the North. South Korea's Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, which has made annual donations to the North worth about US$5.4 million (€3.9 million) via South Korean civic organizations, also said it could not give Pyongyang old medicine. Story Continues Below
Moon Kyung-tae, vice president of the association, said, "How can we send (old) medicines to the North from a medical and moral point of view, even though the North said it would take responsibility?" Seoul is one of the North's major aid donors, sending rice as well as medicine to the isolated country, which suffers from lack of basic medications like antibiotics. As part of efforts to improve North Korea's dire health conditions, civic groups in the South set up a medicine-producing factory in the North in 2005. However, Moon said the operation has been halted since last year due to lack of raw materials and power. In April, Seoul pledged to donate $13 million to improve health conditions for North Korean infants and nursing mothers through U.N. health and relief agencies.
© 2007 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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