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 ...
News to Scythian, it's been a decade; it's already here. With only 24,000 deaths in ten years in a region with minimal medical care, it's hardly a major threat either.
If it were a ‘disease’ we would see germs or viri; we aren't finding this. I would ‘guess’ (I'm not a doctor)that we are looking for some toxin that isn't well regulated in the poorer countries, like it is here.
Or, this could be the start of a Zombie Apocalypse.
For those that didn't bother to read the article, there are a couple of hypotheses. The original one was the use of agricultural chemicals without adequate protection. Now, some believe that the daily cycle of dehydration and heat stress (from working in the fields in a sub-tropical zone) is to blame.
Ping
Ya, I love how the article immediately rules out that it could be pesticides, of course it counldn’t be that. The article states they’re not drinking enough water, ha ! right ...
It’s not a contagious disease. It’s an occupational illness. The article refers to chronic kidney failure that occurs among agricultural and other outdoor laborers and is caused either by exposure to pesticides or by “recurrent dehydration,” meaning that they often do not remain hydrated enough when working outdoors in extreme heat conditions over the years.
So I don’t think it’s likely to come across the border ever.
What causes kidneys to fail like this, Mark? You say the disease is already here - has it been identified?
Started when the Chicoms arrived in the Canal Zone.
Of course if you read the actual article (Which I suspect you didn’t) your addition to the headline is silly.
The best hypothesis is that it is related to constant, repeated dehydration. Not a mention of infectious disease in the article.
The desperate attempts to link disease to illegal immigration are getting a bit ridiculous.
1) Any virulent new virus is going to spread much more rapidly through legal air travel than illegal immigrants walking across the border.
2) Every time there is a thread on drug-resistant infections, people desperately try to link it to illegal immigrants, when, actually, they are a result of ADVANCED health care in the US and Western Europe - you need to actually use advanced antibiotics on people for the bacteria to evolve resistance to them.
Well, I don’t accept medical statements like that from the media or the CDC on blind faith. There are many diseases that caused kidney failure, and if it’s pesticides causing it, you can bet were eating it. Just like the folks that love to drink their “Green Tea” and think it so healthy not realizing it all comes from China and has very high levels of DDT in it.
If this was the case there would be dead all through Mexico and south Texas.
It's not that you used a parenthetical comment, it's that your parenthetical comment is stupid.
Lying about the contents of the article in the headline is not a tradition, except maybe at DU.
The consensus is that they are working themselves to death - repeated dehydration and accumulated kidney damage. Exposure to toxins is the next guess, but one would expect women and children also to be affected as toxins tend to spread.
Slaves were worked so hard on sugar plantations in the Caribbean that the average life expectancy was two or three years.
Makes tax-supported, Everglade-wrecking Florida sugar and high fructose corn syrup seem not so bad.
Not knocking you, justlurking, knocking the "some who believe that..."
He started working 35 years ago, got sick three years ago, and died recently.
The suggestion, then, is that it took 32 years for his kidneys to go bad?
Allied prisoners of the Japanese during WWII suffered horribly from dehydration, but for a lot less than 32 years; many of them suffered from permanent kidney problems.
Most if not all fruits and vegetables are now grown in south and central America. Chemicals banned in the US are still being used. We are being poisoned thru the back door. Buy local, read!!! Heard on the news that Tropicana is mixing thier OJ with the tainted OJ in these areas. beware
Do you work for a tabloid newspaper? If you don’t, you missed your calling.
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