UN health agency chief Margaret Chan said on Friday after a visit to North Korea that the country's health system would be the envy for most developing countries although it faced "challenges". "Based on what I have seen, I can tell you they have something that most other developing countries would envy," she told journalists, despite reports of renewed famine in parts of the country.

"To give you a couple of examples, DPRK has no lack of doctors and nurses, as we see in other developing countries, most of their doctors and nurse have migrated," the director general of the World Health Organisation said. She also highlighted its "very elaborate health infrastructure" extending to a district network of household doctors, she added. [AFP]

It isn't a revelation to me that factual ignorance and moral retardation prevail at the United Nations, but Chan may have lowered the bar. Speaking of a regime that willfully allowed up to 2.5 million of its people to starve to death, while the survivors merely watched their loved ones starve to death, Chan concedes that all is not perfect in North Korea:

"I can see perhaps that malnutrition is an area where the government has to pay attention, especially in pregnant women and young children," Chan said in a telephone news conference about her visit.

Then, citing official North Korean statistics without apparent irony or suspicion ...

[S]he praised the extent of child vaccination in the country, citing coverage of about 90 percent, as well as the way it tackled tuberculosis, malaria and other infectious diseases.

But there were some qualifications:

Chan later accepted that what she saw in Pyongyang "might not be representative of the rest of the country.

To say the least...