By You Soo-sun
The Woongjin Foundation published three new comic books designed to inform children and their parents about rare and hard-to-cure diseases Wednesday. It donated the comic books to all families with children suffering from these diseases.
Since 2008, in collaboration with the Korean Society of Inherited Metabolic Disease, the non-profit foundation has published comic books to help young patients and their parents better understand various diseases and offer coping strategies. They have so far published 21 comic books, each covering a different disease.
The three recently published books are about children’s attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, newborn baby diseases, and Type 2 diabetes. Each comic book is 90 to 150 pages long and consists of cartoons helping children easily understand their symptoms and the types of medications they may take.
According to the organization, there are more than 110 kinds of rare and difficult-to-cure diseases and approximately 500,000 patients in Korea who have one of them.
However, government assistance only covers around 20,000 people. By donating the comic books to all the families and uploading them online, the Woongjin Foundation is giving patients and their families better access to these materials.