Posted on 07/09/2007 2:33:52 PM PDT by blam
Mysterious kidney disease blamed on bad bread
22:00 09 July 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi
Contamination of wheat by Aristolochia clematis, pictured here, could be the cause of deadly kidney failure among thousands of people in the Balkans. (Image: Kurt Stüber)
Farmers in the Balkans are failing to weed out the cause of a kidney disease, according to a new study that appears to have resolved a decades-long mystery.
The contamination of the region's wheat by the birthwort plant seems to be the source of an unusual form of kidney failure and urinary tract cancer that afflicts many people in countries such as Croatia and Serbia.
Researchers believe the finding should spark action by public health officials to save lives by clearing the birthwort plant from grain fields across the region.
Since it was first formally recognised in 1956, the disease called endemic Balkan nephropathy has perplexed experts, who have considered various explanations, including groundwater contamination.
Unlike most patients with kidney failure, people with the Balkan illness often have healthy blood pressure. Nonetheless, as their kidneys begin to fail they require dialysis and about half of them eventually develop a rare cancer of the upper urinary tract.
Chance discovery Arthur Grollman, at the University at Stony Brook, New York, US, did not expect to discover birthwort as the cause of this kidney disease when he set out for the region a few years ago. Instead, he had hypothesised that herbal remedies were to blame for this nephropathy.
He knew about the disastrous mix-up in which thousands of healthy Belgium women developed severe kidney failure requiring transplants after accidentally receiving the Chinese herbal drug guang fang ji instead of the similar-sounding han fang ji.
Grollman suspected a similar cause behind the endemic Balkan nephropathy
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
They’re now going to sell it to the Chinese, who will sell it to us.
wheat gluten with its protein enhanced by a cheap industrial chemical called melamine is what caused widespread kidney failure in tons of US and Canadian pet dogs and cats.....
“A survey of their fields and mills revealed that some of their wheat was indeed contaminated with Aristolochia clematis seed. Back in the lab, Grollman and his colleagues examined kidney samples from Croatian nephropathy patients. They found the same telltale signs of DNA damage linked to Aristolochia clematis as seen in animal studies.”
This sounds like the seed gets mixed in with the harvested wheat and then, when it is milled, the ground-up seed is thoroughly incorporated in the final flour causing the observed problems.
A simple hand weeding process might save thousands of lives.
Yup. when I was 9-10 years old, I was paid a dollar a day to pull 'bitter-weed' out of a dairy farmer's field. It affected the taste of his milk.
Do a google search for Aristolochia clematis, one site is selling it a an herbal remedy to female herpes, the next site is warning that the entire plant is a poison.
This is an endemic problem though, and arguably the basis for German and Austrian beer purity laws so many centuries ago.
Ping.
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