Mystery Disease Killing Sugar Cane Workers

(Central America) According to a detailed report, chronic kidney disease (CKD) has been killing thousands of sugar crop workers in rural Central America.



Workers protest at plantation entrance

It goes by many names, but around here they call it "the malady of the sugar cane". It's a quiet epidemic that has been preying on Central America for at least 20 years, killing impoverished landworkers in their tens of thousands across Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Guatemala. And it is becoming ever more deadly. Between 2005 and 2009, incidents in El Salvador rose by 26%.[…]

The health minister, María Isabel Rodríguez, made a dramatic appeal to the international community for help, telling them: "It is wasting away our populations." But nobody knows what to do about it, because nobody knows what exactly it is.

In the wealthier west, CKD is largely caused by hypertension or diabetes, but most of the victims here have neither. And it attacks the kidneys in an unusual way. Rather than damaging the filtering system, as in ordinary CKD, this disease seems to have an impact on the tubules – the part of the kidney where the composition of the urine is determined.

At the moment, the only scientific consensus is that it's real, and unexplained.

So far, researchers have failed to pinpoint the exact cause of the mysterious and deadly malady. Constant exposure to agrochemicals and persistent dehydration in tropical heat are suggested as likely causes.