Posted on 02/13/2012 9:28:14 AM PST by Scythian
A mysterious epidemic is devastating the Pacific coast of Central America, killing more than 24,000 people in El Salvador and Nicaragua since 2000 and striking thousands of others with chronic kidney disease at rates unseen virtually anywhere else. Scientists say they have received reports of the phenomenon as far north as southern Mexico and as far south as Panama.
Jesus Ignacio Flores started working when he was 16, laboring long hours on construction sites and in the fields of his country's biggest sugar plantation.
Three years ago his kidneys started to fail and flooded his body with toxins. He became too weak to work, wracked by cramps, headaches and vomiting.
On Jan. 19 he died on the porch of his house. He was 51. His withered body was dressed by his weeping wife, embraced a final time, then carried in the bed of a pickup truck to a grave on the edge of Chichigalpa, a town in Nicaragua's sugar-growing heartland, where studies have found more than one in four men showing symptoms of chronic kidney disease.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
You beat me to it.
On just another thought; a NAST team could worm out the cause in 2-3 weeks. Perhaps the heavily subsidized cabal of sugary robber barons has bought out the phony environmental progressives and DC officials?
Progressives want 4.5 billion souls expunged from our voting roles. Once dead, these Zombies are available to vote six time in 2008. When I broke this story thousands of e-mails both Pro/Con have landed upon me.
A couple of decades ago the cause of death would be listed as natural causes and his family would say he had "worked himself to death"
Now they do autopsies and they find out reasons but that does not mean that the reasons were not there before only that they were not recorded.
BTW no one in the US dies from "old age" or "natural causes" any more which is causing the rate of certain conditions to appear to be higher then they were before.
A 25 year old man who died of a heart attack was listed as heart failure, the 70 year old man who died of a heart attack was usually listed as old age. They change they way they report things and suddenly you have a "spike". Because of this it can be very hard to tell what is signal and what is noise.
Since there is no spike in the surrounding area for people who do not work in the fields and since people who work in the fields that are in cooler areas also are not seeing any sort of spike it can be cautiously concluded that this is not caused by any thing more then more exact record keeping.
Could there be some very nasty things lying dormant in the ground or in cave systems that modern humans are not ready for?
Quit using logic and being reasonable. It’s clearly time to panic!
Get a frickin' life, it is obvious he didn't mean the remark to be taken seriously, it is a spoof at the left who are always using something to scare us with. At least that is how I took it, especially after reading the article. FReepers use Paras to modify(if you want to call it that, I call it making a comment on the title)the title, it is done all the time and for you to mention it at all puts you in the posting police category, IMO. Some one who can't help but criticize those who do things not to your liking.
Myself I'm going with UFO medical experiments. You know...probes, prods, puckered little gray men.
“Started when the Chicoms arrived in the Canal Zone.”
LOL!!! (as a Canal Zonian living in Panama.)
I love nothing more than going to Miraflores Locks wearing my Chinese dark blue cap with a red Chinese star in the front, my dark blue Chinese jacket, sunglasses, and wave as ships go burping by. (I acquired my hat and jacket when I was in China.)
You know, you really should read the article. You might learn something.
The researchers are reporting the same phenomena in "hot farming areas in Sri Lanka, Egypt and the Indian east coast."
However, as a couple of people have already suggested, this may be nothing more than better diagnosis and reporting: the deaths were previously attributed to unknown or an incorrect cause.
Grasp of the obvious, different elevations dictate different water source contaminants, be it chemical, mineral, or biological.
Wow, did you come up with that all by yourself? Do you think no one has thought of it? If you had read the article:
"There are other ways to damage the kidney. Heavy metals, chemicals, toxins have all been considered, but to date there have been no leading candidates to explain what's going on in Nicaragua ... As these possibilities get exhausted, recurrent dehydration is moving up on the list."
Even the reporter for this particular mainstream media outlet has done a reasonable job of anticipating your questions before you posed them, and I doubt it's an exhaustive summary of the research.
Funny you would mention that.
One of the causes of dehydration is uremia, which is caused by kidney failure.
The article cites a study that is about to be published that found higher levels of creatinin in people living/working in the hotter coastal areas vs. higher altitude.
High levels of creatinin indicate impaired kidney function.
Is it the smoking gun? I don't think so. But, I found it interesting that so many posters to this thread are willing to immediately discount it.
There's always the possibility that a common disease or virus has found particularly favorable conditions to spread but.....poor folks taking another hit...ouch!
Most of the facilities they do go to are small, individually owned doctors offices who certainly wouldn't have the record keeping wherewithall necessary to allow an accurate study of this "weird disease" over the past decades.
I've been to Honduras many times with my sister and her husband (who is from there) and I have seen the workers early in the morning walking the highways with nothing but their machete's and a sack lunch, no indication whatsoever of them carring bottles of Absopure water like everyone here does.
I've seen them hacking away at the sugar cane and yard workers cutting grass with their machete's and no evidence at all that they were sweating. Their bodies are so accustomed to the heat that they probably don't experience the overwhelming thirst that triggers the need to drink water like we would if we were doing physical activity down there.
Another thing to consider is that in Central America, no matter what city you go to, they do not have the water purification systems that we have here in the U.S. and thus all the "safe" drinking water is provided via those giant water bottles you might see in offices here. Virtually every hotel and household in the cities buy their drinking water.
The campesinos who live in the small villages out in the country do not have the luxury or money available to purchase their drinking water and so most likely they rely on the water from their faucets (if they have any and in these villages many do not). For those people, you can see their women washing their clothes in the river....
So before I start putting the blame on agricultural chemicals (which by the way most of the small sugar cane plantations, cocoa and pineapple growers do not use) I would focus on the hydration practices and quality of water these workers are drinking.......
In reading about this affliction, the first thing that came to mind was poisoning by industrial chemicals.
I recently read the book, The Poisoners Handbook. It is about chemistry and the development of forensic medecine in New York City during the Prohibition years. Very interesting read.
Yup, it's amazing the degree to which "health care" is actually more dependent upon implementing modern utilities and early 20th Century public health practices than it is upon building medical facilities. Beyond that, even American medical science is heavily dependent upon computers, laproscopic instruments, prosthetic, sophisticated materials, and imaging technologies. I've maintained for years that our advances in human health are far more due to engineers than to physicians.
That was the prevailing opinion, albeit agricultural chemicals. But, some additional research has been done and a study is about to be published that proposes an alternative theory.
Is it conclusive? I don't think so. But, discounting it simply because the "consensus" pins the blame on agricultural chemicals is like saying that "anthropogenic climate change" is "settled science".
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My dad has problems with his bladder and frequently experiences bladder infections.
His doctor has told him that most of the problems he is experiencing could be eliminated if he would drink about 96oz. of water everyday. That is about 12oz every 90 minutes but dad forgets to chug it down.
I wonder if the problem in Central America is due to a combination of events: not enough hydration to flush out residue combined with chemical exposure not normally a problem except if it builds up in the system.
It will be interesting to find out what the problem really is.
Fer pete’s sake, this is NOT a communicable disease. Disease refers to an illness, and in this case these men - who were outdoor laborers in their youth - seem to have gotten kidney failure from either exposure to pesticides or simply dehydration because they didn’t drink enough water during the day while they did heavy physical labor in high temperatures. Eventually the kidneys simply can’t take it.
But this “disease” is not coming here unless Obama sends us all to work on a banana plantation somewhere in Castro’s Cuba.
I see, from thousands of miles away, you have every case exhibiting these symptoms completely diagnosed to the exclusion of all other possibilities, exceeding even the knowledge of the physicians directly examining the patients (who presumably have considered the obvious, seeing as they probably see it a lot; either that, or they're a pack of dishonest grant hustlers, which is entirely possible).
Wouldn’t a microscopic exam of the victim’s kidney reveal something like scarring or crystals of something?
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