the biggest financial contributor to TB control in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea since 2010, announced that it will close its programs there in June, citing challenges working in the country."

People in China like to joke that North Korea has two lethal weapons: nuclear missiles and tuberculosis.

While the rogue state’s nuclear ambitions have long inspired angst—and led to economic sanctions—the threat of TB, the planet’s biggest infectious killer, has garnered less attention. With more than 100,000 cases in 2016, North Korea is on the World Health Organization’s list of nations with the greatest incidence of the deadly lung disease, and doctors warn that an explosion in multidrug-resistant strains could be coming.

The closure of programs is likely to lead to “massive stock outs of quality-assured TB drugs nationwide,” wrote Harvard Medical School doctors in an open letter to the Global Fund, published on March 14 in the British medical journal the Lancet. Such privation in the past has “led to the rapid creation of drug-resistant TB strains, as doctors ration pills and patients take incomplete regimens,” they wrote. ...

In an open letter to the Geneva-based organization published on March 13 by the Korean Central News Agency, North Korea’s official news agency, Kim Hyong Hun, the country’s vice minister of public health, accused the Global Fund of bowing to the “pressure of some hostile forces.” President Trump has been trying to enlist other nations in a campaign of sanctions against North Korea.

“The decision to suspend the Global Fund projects in North Korea, with almost no transparency or publicity, runs counter to the ethical aspiration of the global health community, which is to prevent death and suffering due to disease, irrespective of the government under which people live,” Seung and his colleagues wrote in the Lancet.

Furin sees it as another dimension of the tensions between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whom the U.S. president nicknamed “Little Rocket Man” after the nation tested its missile capabilities in September. The two nations are slated to meet in an historic summit as early as May. “You can’t help but think global powers are very concerned about North Korea’s erratic behavior, and this is a way to punish the country,” she says.

“But this is a weapon of destruction in and of itself. TB is an airborne disease. It doesn’t stay within borders.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-11/north-korea-s-other-weapon-is-poised-to-explode