The Korea Times

Seoul is vulnerable to FMD

By Lee Hyo-sik Two cattle farms in a town, just north of Seoul, have become the latest victim of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), making the nation’s capital more vulnerable to the deadly virus. After devastating livestock farms in Andong and other cities in North Gyeongsang Province over the past few weeks, the disease has made its way closer into the region surrounding Seoul. On Monday, the two farms in Goyang City, Gyeonggi Province, about 20 kilometers north of Seoul, were confirmed to be infected with the highly infectious disease after animals showed symptoms, including excessive drooling and blisters on the tongue the previous day. Owners and quarantine authorities culled and buried a total of 200 cows. Last Wednesday, two pig farms in Yangju and Yeoncheon were forced to destroy a combined 24,000 pigs, while additional 18,000 pigs and cows at 23 farms within a 500-meter radius of the infected farms were slaughtered and buried. A cattle farm in nearby Paju also confirmed an outbreak of FMD. Experts say that it is just a matter of time for foot-and-mouth disease to s

Dec 20, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

South Korea

Disclosing sex offenders info violates human rights

By Lee Hyo-sik Korea’s human rights watchdog said Sunday that it opposes the National Assembly’s move to strengthen the anti-sex crime law, arguing it could infringe upon the personal rights of sex offenders and their family members. After reviewing a revised bill on the punishment of sex criminals, initiated by Rep. Kwon Young-se of the Grand National Party and 19 other lawmakers in July, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said disclosing the name, photo, address, age and other personal information of sex offenders to nearby residents is feared to violate their dignity and privacy, their family members and their neighbors with this revision. Under the current law which went into effect in April, the government is obliged to notify nearby households with children under 19 via mail of the name, age and other private information of those who have been arrested for committing sex crimes against not only minors, but also adults. But lawmakers proposed the revision in a bid to make more information public on sex criminals, such as a photo of where they are living and

Dec 19, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

South Korea

Clip shows students harassing teacher

By Lee Hyo-sik A video clip of middle school students verbally harassing a female teacher in a classroom is causing an uproar, which some Internet users claim is the result of the abolition of teachers’ authority following the banning of corporal punishment at school. The footage shows both female and male students asking the teacher a series of sexually-harassing questions, despite repeated calls for restraint by the teacher. In a 100-second-long footage uploaded onto web portals and Internet community sites, Saturday, students ask the teacher such questions as “When did you kiss for the first time?, “When did you get your first period?” and “When did you first have sex?” They even ask whether she gave birth to a baby and whether it hurt. Upset by the students and their ill-mannered remarks, the teacher tries to restore order in the classroom by saying to the students, “Instead of making meaningless remarks, let’s open the textbook.” But the clip shows the pupils ignoring her by continuing to ask sexually-embarrassing questions, while banging on the desks. The teach

Dec 19, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

South Korea

Hemorrhoidectomy claims top spot on 2009 surgery list

By Lee Hyo-sik Hemorrhoids were the most frequently cited illness causing Koreans to head to the surgery room last year, the National Health Insurance Corp. (NHIC) said Thursday. A total of 1.46 million individuals received one of 33 types of major operations in 2009, up 9.2 percent from a year earlier. Of the 1.46 million, 272,290 men and women received surgery for hemorrhoids, followed by cataracts at 268,548 and cesarean sections at 154,684. Among the main 33 kinds of surgeries, the number of operations performed to fix thyroid glands increased at the steepest rate of 68 percent to 38,412 last year from 22,905 in 2006. The NHIC said the cost of operations performed in 2009 on the 33 major illnesses reached a combined 3.5 trillion won, up 1 trillion won from three years prior. Medical expenses financing spinal surgery were the largest at 446.5 billion won, followed by cataract operations at 372 billion won. Expenses for a mastectomy, the last resort to treating breast cancer, surged 200.5 percent over the three-year-period, while the costs for thyroid operation

Dec 16, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

South Korea

FMD spreading faster than expected

By Lee Hyo-sik Livestock farms in northern Gyeonggi Province have been put on the highest alert for foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), with several pig and cattle farms there falling victim to the deadly virus over the past two days. After devastating farms in Andong and other cities in North Gyeongsang Province over the past few weeks, the disease has made its way into the region surrounding Seoul. Experts say it is just a matter of time for foot-and-mouth disease to spread to the rest of the country, given that the virus becomes more infectious in cold weather. On Wednesday, two pig farms in Yangju and Yeoncheon, Gyeonggi Province, were confirmed to be infected with FMD, forcing the owners to cull a total of 24,000 pigs. Additionally, a total of 18,000 pigs and cows at 23 farms within a 500-meter radius of the infected farms were slaughtered and buried. Later on the same day, a cattle farm in nearby Paju was confirmed infected with the deadly disease, forcing owners and quarantine authorities to destroy cows, pigs and other cloven-hoofed animals in the area. But FMD tes

Dec 16, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

South Korea

To spank or not to spank

By Kelly Sein Oh There is one tradition that many people can relate to, but is seldom talked about: corporal punishment or one of its most common forms, spanking. Everyone, at one time or other in her youth, has been spanked by a teacher or parents. Adults deem it discipline; children call it unfair. Corporal punishment by definition is the infliction of pain as a form of punishment. The nature of the infliction, nevertheless, raises a question of the validity of the punishment: Doesn’t it lead to child abuse? As Dr. Irwin Hyman, the director of the National Center for the Study of Corporal Punishment at Temple University lamented, “How the hell can we eliminate child abuse when schools are allowed to do these things?” Seoul has already banned corporal punishment throughout its schools. This has invited a mixed response _ relief from the students, mostly protests from the teachers who complain that “they have no positive alternative measures to replace corporal punishment.” Regardless, the other cities should shortly follow Seoul’s lead. Corporal punishment should be illegal in

Dec 15, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

South Korea

Miracle at the shupeo?

By Lyman McLallen I live in Seoul in an apartment building near the university where I work. I buy a lot of my groceries at the “shupeo" on the corner near my building. In Korean spelling symbols, hangeul, it comes out sounding like “shoo-puh?to my American ear. The Koreans have borrowed the word from the American “supermarket?but changed its sound slightly and given it a little different meaning. They have made it a Konglish word, as you hear people call it: a word borrowed from English and made into Korean. In Korea, a shupeo is a small store in the neighbourhood where you buy groceries and sundries. I shop at the shupeo almost every day.? A man and a woman only a little older than I ― sixty-one ― run the shupeo. It is a real mom-and-pop store, the kind that has almost disappeared in America, but you can still find them in every neighbourhood of Seoul. The big supermarkets and convenience store chains have yet to take completely over in Korea and run the mom-and-pops out of business. I buy fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, soap, light bulbs, and other such things from th

Dec 15, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

South Korea

Runaway bear captured nine days after escape

By Lee Hyo-sik A baby Malayan Sun Bear that escaped from its cage in a zoo on the outskirts of Seoul on Dec. 6 was captured Wednesday after having eluded police officers and zoo staffers for nine days. Seoul Zoo said its search team climbed Mt. Cheonggye at 5 a.m. Wednesday morning to check traps. At around 8:30 a.m., the team found the 6-year-old male bear caught inside one of the traps. The bear, nicknamed “kkoma,” meaning a little boy in Korean, appears to be healthy, officials said. The zoo had installed seven traps containing honey, wine and fish — the favorite food of the missing black bear — in the areas surrounding all the peaks of the mountain range. “The bear appears to be in good shape. We think he was lured into a trap by food and was then locked inside the moment he stepped in. The animal was immediately given an anesthetic to calm it down,” a Seoul Zoo official said. But in the process, zoo staffers faced difficulty in anesthetizing the bear as the drug was initially frozen, due to low temperatures, the official said. “The animal was th

Dec 15, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

South Korea

KTO sells 19 percent stake in GKL

By Lee Hyo-sik The Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) said Wednesday that it has disposed of a 19 percent stake in Grand Korea Leisure (GKL), the operator of Seven Luck Casino, as part of the Lee Myung-bak administration’s drive to overhaul the governance structure of state-run companies. The KTO still holds a controlling 51 percent stake in the operator of the foreigner-only casino chain. GKL currently operates a casino at the Millennium Hilton Seoul hotel at the foot of Mt. Nam in central Seoul, another in southern Seoul and a third in Busan. On Dec. 10, it sold a 19 percent stake, or about 11.75 million shares, at 18,700 won per share on a block sale to 37 institutional investors, 4.1 percent discounted from the closing price of 19,500 won the previous day. The sale raised some 220 billion won. When GKL went public in November 2009, the KTO disposed of a 30 percent stake and with the latest sale it completed a mandate to sell a 49-percent-stake in GKL under the government campaign of overhauling state enterprises. “We generated about 220 billion won by selling the 19

Dec 15, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

South Korea

Secondhand smoke increases diabetes risk

By Lee Hyo-sik Non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke for more than four hours a day are nearly two times more likely to develop diabetes, compared to those who are not, according to a health study conducted by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Wednesday. By studying a group of persons sharing particular statistical or demographic characteristics for a certain period of time, the center investigated the correlation between environmental tobacco smoke and type-2 diabetes for the first time in Korea. As part of a large-scale health study project, called the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study (KoGES), which was launched in 2001, the center examined residents in Ansan and Anseong, Gyeonggi Province, for six years, and found that exposure to second hand smoke increases the risk of diabetes. The KoGES focuses on determining the causes of cancer and other chronic diseases inflicting a large number of Koreans. “A dose-response relationship was confirmed as the more people are exposed to secondhand smoke, the more likely they develop diabetes, The study

Dec 15, 2010By Lee Hyo-sik

Lee Hyo-sik

Read more

Seoul is vulnerable to FMD

Disclosing sex offenders info violates human rights

Clip shows students harassing teacher

Hemorrhoidectomy claims top spot on 2009 surgery list

FMD spreading faster than expected

To spank or not to spank

Miracle at the shupeo?

Runaway bear captured nine days after escape

KTO sells 19 percent stake in GKL

Secondhand smoke increases diabetes risk

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