Apparently the WHO is defending the North Korean healthcare after the Amnesty produced a rather horrific report on North Korean healthcare. They had previously stated that North Korea's healthcare is the envy of the Western World, and said many things like how North Korea has no shortage of doctors, yet the amnesty report says that people had to walk two hours to get surgery.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100716/ap_on_he_me/un_un_nkorea_health

I'd like to say that the WHO report was flawed, but that would be predictable. This seems to hack at their credibility, everyone knows North Korea is in a dire state, it can't feed its own population only one city has sufficient electricity and that's Pyongyang, there are few cars, there were in some cases cannibalism.

Since you insisted on linking yourself, I'll respond here and nip this in the bud.

How about you actually read the article, hm?

"We certainly have a lot of restrictions in terms of working in North Korea, but we did our best in terms of capturing the information we could verify," Zarifi said. "We don't take the WHO's statements as criticizing or rejecting Amnesty's findings."

If they don't, why the hell should you?

They don't say that Amnesty are wrong, they just question the validity of their findings, as they are expected to do. Amnesty's report was flawed: it used out-of-date figures and anecdotal evidence. It's not their fault, of course, it's because NK has closed borders.

As for Chan's April claim that "people in the country do not have to worry about a lack of financial resources to access care," Garwood said hundreds of field missions have been conducted in North Korea.
"None have come back reporting the kinds of things in the Amnesty report in terms of payment for services," he said.
"I'm not saying they're not credible accounts," he added. "But it's not taking into account some of the things that are happening today."
Zarifi, of Amnesty, said the whole debate would be ended if North Korea's government provided access to monitors so that everyone had a better understanding of the country's health care system.

The UN is merely questioning the accuracy of Amnesty's claims, and pointing out that things have changed since the data for the report was gathered. This does nothing to undermine the WHO's credibility. Thank you and goodnight.