In yet another indication of the dire poverty and medical care most ordinary North Koreans are forced to accept,... new data shows... an unacceptable number of children in the country die before their fifth birthday.
The Seoul-based Korea Development Institute said Thursday that... 53 out of 1-thousand North Korean children below the age of five died in 2012... that's up by five deaths compared to the year 2000.
In South Korea,... only three out of 1-thousand children of the same age group died.
The ratio of children with chronic malnutrition in the North has actually dropped sharply since 2000... but still stood at 28 percent in 2012.
The professor who led the study says... it's impossible to verify whether the nutritional status of North Korean children has improved that much... considering the increase in the number of young deaths.
