Kidney Disease Linked to Agrochemical Exposure Spikes in El Salvador

[Judi Lynn]

Kidney Disease Linked to Agrochemical Exposure Spikes in El Salvador
Wednesday, 23 September 2015 00:00
By Emma Lawlor, ecoviva | News Analysis

El Salvador is struggling with a growing health epidemic among its rural residents: Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). In 2008, the country registered the world’s highest mortality rate from kidney failure. Over 3,000 people died from CKD between just January 2010 and July 2014. Doctors diagnose 60 new cases each month.

Traditionally, CKD is a secondary effect of diabetes or hypertension. In the early 2000s, Central Americans began noticing significant numbers of CKD cases among otherwise healthy agricultural workers and rural residents. Researchers believe this new form ofkidney disease is caused by some combination of agrochemicalexposure and dehydration. Yet the only consensus is that the causes are complicated, likely multifactorial, and stem from the entrenched inequalities and poverty that affect rural Central America.

While medical and public health researchers continue to heatedly debate the epidemic’s exact causes, and intergovernmental cooperation has so far been minimal, Salvadorans are recognizing that building a response cannot wait. In 2013, an attempt to ban the importation and use of 53 agrochemicals nationally was, in part, a CKD-prevention effort. And the Ministry of Health (MINSAL), with support from the Pan American Health Organization and Cuban doctors, has sponsored research and clinical interventions.

The Lower Lempa has been the launching point for a number of these efforts, due to the region’s high rates of CKD as well as its strong local tradition of social mobilization and organization. “There is something very positive in these communities,” former Minister of Health Dra. Maria Isabel Rodriguez told me, speaking of MINSAL’s productive collaborations around CKD in the Lower Lempa.

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/32927-kidney-disease-linked-to-agrochemical-exposure-spikes-in-el-salvador

Good reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016132894

[KT2000]

1. Multifactorial

is the trick that gets agro-chem companies off the hook. It is used for every case when searching for links to disease from these commercial products. We are born with a host of chemicals now and it goes on from there.

There has to be a new standard based on common sense when people's lives are at stake like this. Letting the big co's destroy lives is not acceptable.
The companies that are selling to this area should be required to pay for testing and research if they are going to hide behind "multifactorial." They should also supply a pool of money for treatment. That should be the cost for being engaged in such a business.

[Judi Lynn]

2. The workers who are poisoned by their products have to endure incredible suffering.

The very idea they could simply turn their heads and ignore what they are causing living human beings until they finally have to go ahead and die, without hope, is unforgiveable. There actually isn't a punishment equal to what they have done to these innocent, and unlucky people who were unfortunate enough to have born into circumstances which didn't allow them the tools to do more than struggle endlessly without even a dream things might get better some day for them.

In the meantime, the poor are ALSO shunned, abhorred, ridiculed, and abused by the ruling classes and their idle, useless spawn. They have additional hardships the elites of their society couldn't begin to survive.

"Multifactorial" is an amazing catch-all. What a mighty slime-master had to have invented that one.