A Russian region next to Ukraine has blamed a spike in intestinal worm infections on the influx of North Korean laborers, a health care report shows, pointing to a small coal-mining town as a hotbed of the parasites.

The Rostov region’s health care watchdog named North Korean “labor migrants” as responsible for the spread of two types of soil-transmitted helminths, or parasitic worms, and two other parasites linked to raw fish consumption in its recent report on epidemiological infections from 2025.

Whipworm infections (trichuriasis), skyrocketed to 68 cases last year from just three the previous year, after zero cases in