in the attack
It is not just North Korea’s artillery and nuclear power that threaten the South. There are also mosquitoes. Since August, South Korean authorities have stepped up their insect hunt. Trapping devices are particularly active on the edge of the DMZ, the demilitarized zone that runs along the border between the two Koreas. They work by emitting substances naturally present on human skin or carbon dioxide to attract dipterans. In North Korea, malaria remains endemic, with 4,500 cases recorded between 2021 and 2022, according to the WHO. Lack of resources would prevent Pyongyang from dealing with this plague transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes, capable of traveling up to 12 kilometers and proliferating with global warming.
Collateral victims
In an article in the magazine Social History of Medicine (May 2016), Kim Jeong-ran of Oxford University recalls that “Malaria was widespread throughout much of the peninsula”. The South Korean programme to combat the disease dates back to 1959. The measures implemented have yielded spectacular results and in 1979 the WHO recognised the eradication of malaria in South Korea. It was in Paju, in the north of South Korea, that it reappeared. A soldier contracted it in 1993. In 2000, 4,000 cases were reported. New measures have made it possible to reduce this figure to a few hundred per year. However, between 2022 and 2023, it has increased by almost 80%, from 420 to 747. And the situation is getting worse. As of July 2024, 70 cases were recorded.
Rear base
Lack of cooperation between North and South, “It is not possible to fight pests in the DMZ,” “Laments Kim Dong-gun, a biologist at Sahmyook University. Created in 1953 at the end of the Korean War, this 4-kilometer-wide strip of land free of human habitation separates the two Koreas along 250 kilometers from east to west. From the marshy areas at the mouth of the Han River in the Yellow Sea in the west to the mountainous terrain in the east, the area represents 90,000 hectares of varied landscapes. A thousand plants, 650 species of vertebrates, reptiles and amphibians and 52 species of mammals survive there. “animals that serve as a source of blood for mosquitoes to lay their eggs,” explains Kim Hyun-woo of the South Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency.
Front line
Faced with rising malaria cases, Seoul issued a national alert this year and called for the intensification of the mosquito-catching and monitoring network, which was set up in the 1990s in the north-west of Gyeonggi Province, where Paju is on the front line. The city, separated from the North Korean municipalities of Jangpung and Kaesong by the DMZ, is home to the village of Panmunjeom, where the Korean War armistice was signed. Considered part of the “Cold War front”, it was turned into a real garrison town and the freedom of movement of its inhabitants was severely hampered. Thanks to the easing of tensions on the peninsula in the 2000s, the region experienced rapid economic growth.
