Body
We always hesitate a bit when putting up a Not Satire post. The purpose is not simply to mock North Korea; we write them when the absurdity is revealing (our Not Satire posts can be found here, most recently on lobster farming). But in this case, the press coverage of North Korean claims for a new drug may be more appropriately put in the “pot calling the kettle black” category.
In a short item on the English-language KCNA website, the North Korean news agency touts the benefits Pugang Pharmaceutic Company's "Kumdang-2," made from ginseng with “insam saccharides, light rare earth elements, and micro-quantities of gold and platinum.” The medicine even has a website with surprisingly good production values. This is not the first time the drug has been touted; every time a global pandemic appears to come along, Kumdang-2 is rolled out as the cure; a 2013 story covers the benefits vis-a-vis avian flu, the pandemic de jour at the time. Snarky coverage is now making the North Korea press echo chamber: the Guardian, the WaPo and Yonhap have all piled on with—surprise, surprise!—doubts that Kumdang-2 injections provide protection for avian flu, SARS, or MERS.
There are ways in which the mockery is justified. The country has a dilapidated health care system unable to manage its own TB problem, and is attracted to phony scientific claims and technological leapfrogging. The story is perhaps most revealing in the way the outside world—with its swirling pandemics—is portrayed as a hellhole of disease and misery from which the regime needs to protect its vulnerable population; the Ebola scare ended up snarling travel to the country for months. “Kumdang-2” (“golden sugar”) even sounds like a new-generation missile.
But wait a minute, folks. Just for the record, information is beautiful has a nice visualization of “snake oil supplements” on sale in the United States. The graphic relies on meta-analysis of supplements that have actually been tested (and many aren’t because of the political economy of the American industry on which more in a minute). Forget the obscure ones—the royal jellies and luteins and krill oil. As the chart shows, most vitamins and hot-ticket fad items like fish oil have dubious health effects as well.
Of course, whether these supplements actually have effect may not matter, because as the New York Attorney General recently charged in a landmark case, it is not even clear that you are getting these supplements when you buy them, and even from major suppliers. You want Not Satire? Ginseng was one of the supplements that was found to be missing altogether in one of the Attorney General's test. And these are major suppliers; forget the rapacious online scam-world. My guess is that Kumdang-2 probably at least has ginseng in it.
But what is even worse is that the political economy of this dead-weight loss on the American economy is perfectly well-known: the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, championed effectively and defended over the years by Senator Orrin Hatch and benefitting a number of Utah interests. The law effectively absolves supplements from requirements that they be tested for safety or effectiveness. Could someone explain to me why this is not a license to engage in pure theft, and precisely against the uninformed—and therefore probably poor—who are most vulnerable? It’s not as if we are ignorant of the issue either; Scott Gavura has a great post at Science-Based Medicine that details how dubious health claims exploit, including the fact that the majority of the population appears to believe that these supplements are in fact subject to regulatory oversight that is in fact altogether absent.
In the discourse over the Korean peninsula, nothing drives me crazier than soft moral equivalence (‘well, we have our human rights problems too!”). But profound hypocrisy is a close second; we’ll let Frank Zappa lay it down for you.
