This is more like titillation wrapped-up in a respectable jacket of 'serious current affairs' to get some clicks.

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Even ignoring this aspect, there are two reasons for not waging a war to NK:

  1. NK is under China's protection, primarily for acting as buffer country (this is a valid political reason)
  2. NK does have offensive power; even without nuclear warheads, due to geographical positioning, it can do a huge amount of damange to SK.

But to be fair, I have no answer to the question if ignoring abuses as "internal affairs" is the better option. A very complex problem indeed.

If you have waterborne disease like that it's always a sign of inadequate infrastructure.

> to be fair there has been plenty of justification for humanitarian intervention in NK for the past 60 years

Broadly agree to that. Amazing that we're finally opening our eyes to that at this particular point in history, isn't it.

Then there's the question of how history will view the rest of us for looking the other way while the Kims turned an entire country into a concentration camp.

That's another question entirely. Imagine if we'd left Auschwitz up and running at the end of WWII.

Sounds like a reasonable statement. How do you get from this to "motivate military invasion"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fun fact: South Korea had a very serious schistosome problem, too. Merck discovered Praziquantel in the early 1970s, it's the only medication that really works but Merck could not provide doses at a price the country could afford. So South Korean chemists got to work and developed their own process, and it gave the Korean chemical industry a big boost. Shinpoong still produce 50 % of the world's supply of praziquantel. The WHO report is here, btw: http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Jwhozip48e/1.html

Parasites are often closely associated with unusual diets. Here's the CDC page on screening refugees for parasites[1].

There's a vast amount of literature about this[2]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/guidelines/domest...

[2] https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=parasites+and+diet+r...

Not the EU/UK Not Japan Not China Not South Korea Not Russia

The US possibly but who listens to them anymore?

Of course, letting things go for long enough to actually allow North Korea to produce working nuclear weapons is probably not very smart either, but I guess hindsight is 20:20.

Military invasion, while unlikely (cost, mainly destruction,) would probably be better for 99.99% of North Koreans. Oh, if they are ever attacked it will be because they have threatened to nuke quite a few countries.

wrong way to calculate. Sometimes you need to die so others, including your family, have a chance.

Of course, you can say who are we to decide that "John" in North Korea should die for freedom...

Hundreds of thousands of people, slowly languishing in famine and unspeakable suffering, all ignored because it's an 'inconvenient problem'.

That was exactly my point. The problem was ignored, and at times when it couldn't be ignored, NK would bluff, and the rest of the world would appease them.

Can you justify that opinion? Why did it take the US to sanction a Chinese bank?

But then, I'm English so maybe I'm assume more familiarity with the BBC than the average HNer.