The Eugene Bell Foundation
The Eugene Bell Foundation works to cure those with tuberculosis in North Korea. The country is an especially difficult place to reach and work and BF wanted a PR company that understood the difficulties and political challenges they face. Hathaway Communications works with EBF to not only gt work out about the work they do, but to do so that does not jeopardize the future o their work, or their safety.
Hathaway Communications recently pitched a story to the Associated Press about Eugene Bell and it ran internationally in hundreds of media outlets.
US charity helps NKorea fight drug-resistant TB
WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite worsening U.S.-North Korean relations, an American charity is ramping up efforts against an epidemic of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in the isolated country, where it says it is making inroads in fighting the deadly disease.
The Eugene Bell Foundation travels to North Korea twice a year, bringing high-end equipment and drugs to treat TB patients at old-world facilities. The disease has found fertile ground in North Korea, where the population has been weakened by malnutrition since a famine in the 1990s. The foundation returns this month on a whirlwind, three-week mission to help hundreds of patients.
It appears an unlikely partnership: a Christian-based organization located in Washington, teaming up with an authoritarian government intolerant of religion. North Korea currently faces stiff U.S. criticism for detaining three Americans, including a tourist who is soon expected to face trial after his arrest for leaving a Bible at a sailors’ club.
Yet the foundation, which does not proselytize, says it has a good working relationship with the North and its doctors. It started out providing food aid during the famine, but has since mostly helped the nation’s creaky health system.
“It’s a collaboration, and it works. Our goals are aligned,” said John Rogers, executive director of the foundation, which was set up by the son of a Southern Presbyterian missionary family with long experience in Korea. “Their agenda and our agenda is to save the lives of these people and put a stop to this curable, deadly disease.”