North Korea's artillery and nuclear weapons are not the only things threatening South Korea. There are also mosquitoes. Since August, South Korean authorities have stepped up their hunt for these insects, including by using capture devices along the DMZ, the demilitarized zone running along the border between the two Koreas. They work by emitting substances that are naturally present on human skin, or carbon dioxide, to attract the insects. Malaria remains endemic in North Korea, with 4,500 cases recorded between 2021 and 2022, according to the WHO. A lack of resources allegedly prevents Pyongyang from tackling this scourge transmitted by mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus, which can travel up to 12 kilometers and are proliferating due to global warming.
In an article in the journal Social History of Medicine (May 2016), Oxford University's Kim Jeong-ran recalled that "malaria was widespread in much of the peninsula." South Korea's program to combat the disease dates back to 1959. The resources it deployed led to spectacular results, and in 1979, the WHO recognized the eradication of malaria in South Korea. It reappeared in Paju, a city in the north of South Korea, when a soldier contracted it in 1993. 4,000 cases were reported in 2000. New measures reduced this number to just a few hundred a year, but between 2022 and 2023, it jumped by almost 80% from 420 to 747. And the situation is getting worse. In July 2024, 70 cases were recorded.
Due to the lack of cooperation between North and South, "it's not possible to combat parasites in the DMZ," lamented Kim Dong-gun, a biologist at Sahmyook University. Established in 1953, at the end of the Korean War, this 4-kilometer-wide strip of land free of any human presence separates the two Koreas over 250 kilometers from east to west. From the marshlands at the mouth of the Han River on the Yellow Sea in the west to the mountainous terrain in the east, this area includes 90,000 hectares of varied landscapes. A thousand plants, 650 species of vertebrates, reptiles and amphibians and 52 species of mammals survive in it. These "animals serve as a source of blood for mosquitoes to lay their eggs," explained Kim Hyun-woo of South Korea's Disease Control and Prevention Agency.
Faced with the rising number of malaria cases, Seoul issued a nationwide alert this year, calling for an intensification of the mosquito capture and surveillance network set up in the 1990s. In the north-west of Gyeonggi province, Paju is on the front line of this fight. 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 an integral part of the "Cold War front line," it was turned into a garrison town, and its inhabitants' freedom of movement was severely curtailed. As tensions eased on the peninsula in the 2000s, the region experienced rapid economic growth.