Posted on 05/12/2017 6:29:02 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Two years ago when I was living in Nicaragua, my friends and I were at a house party drinking Flor de Caña rum. Hearing that I was a journalist, an acquaintance leaned in and said that there was something I needed to hear.
She began to tell me a story about that very rum we were drinking, and how people were dying because of it.
Many of the workers who harvested sugarcane for the rum were suffering from chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (CKDu), she said, a kidney failure disease correlated with heavy workload, heat, dehydration, and possibly pesticides.
Recent studies have shown that there’s a direct correlation between climate change and CKDu. The disease affects farm workers across the globe, including here in California.
According to a report conducted by UC Davis researchers, agricultural workers in the USA are 20 times more likely to have a heat-related illness than workers in other industries.
What they found: Heat strain and piece-rate work are associated with kidney failure in California farm workers. Unlike hourly rate work, piece-rate rewards higher productivity, and gives workers a strong financial incentive to skip breaks.
The study authors recommended adjusting payment structures and decreasing heat exposure.
“Climate change will impact our entire economic system and CKDu is potentially a canary in the coal mine, a warning of what is to come,” he says. “The cost of mitigating our carbon use now, pale by comparison to the costs that we will incur being forced to address [the] water crisis… The health costs that go along with that are not worth the short term gain of torching dead dinosaurs to fuel our economy. We should take stock, we should take care of those who provide the fundamentals of our way of life.”
(Excerpt) Read more at kcet.org ...
Global temperatures have risen by less than one degree since the low point of the Little Ice Age. Anyone delicate enough that a temperature increase that small destroys them belongs in an institution, not out in the real world, where far more terrible things happen (like the sun going behind a cloud or coming back out again, or a breeze starting or suddenly stopping, or the sun setting in the evening and then rising the next morning).
What another crock of sh**!
This is old.
Sugar cane workers have suffered from this sort of thing forever. Sugarcane worker is a killing job, especially cane cutters.
I recall it cited as an occupational hazard 50 years ago, in Negros Island.
I'll see your weeding onions and raise you loading hay bales onto wagons in South Louisiana, in August. And yes, it "was" hot.
Workers drink sugar soda because the water is not drinkable,that has nothing to do with climate change.
Under common core,PBS has been brain wash the kids about climate change.
This has nothing to do with Budweiser
Back at former suburbia home our new large school district described their athletic workout room and it was posh.
I told my husband that the football team of older times (70’s and earlier) were mostly boys from the country. Many arose at 5pm each day to milk cattle and had to get home to do homework and milk again. Others hauled hay during the summer months to “beef up”! Hard work, resting on Sundays after church, a little time Saturday nights to dance or sleep over in town with friends....life was hard but good. Most did so well in school they went to college or in tech positions and moved to run businesses in the cities.
When many parents (we have no children) talk about their kids and grandchildren living at home in their 20’s and working for fast food or not working, it’s sad they don’t have places like these boys grew up to go to for a year and know what real work is like!
the heat and swamps of Ft. Polk was why I opted to enlist for armor with Basic training and assignment to 194th Armored Brigade at Ft. Knox, instead of enlisting to be an infantryman in my late brother-in-laws’ Army National Guard company....All of their enlistees went to Ft. Polk for 6 months of basic and infantry AIT. :)
I was on a real farm today, with workers.
South of Berlin, dated back to the time of Knights.
We're to believe a rise in Nicaragua's temperature by one tenth of one degree is causing this? Sorry - that's nuts. People who have looked into this feel there's a good chance it's some form a chemical pollution that's causing the problems.
Any different than picking green beans, tomatoes, corn, okra,cotton by hand in the hot humid South back in the days of DDT?
1962.
Average temp, 98 degrees, sometimes much hotter.
Humidity 60-80%
Average pay, 1 cent a pound.
Water provided, maybe. Pee behind a bush if you could make pee. Men, women, children all in the fields working.
Wait! I remember these were all WHITE people! Where was our “privilege”?
And their idiot siblings majored in Human Resources Management.
***loading hay bales***
Wow! Forgot about that! The man we worked for bucking hay would make his own bales and the weight would be close to 80 lb each, for HIS OWN use. For sale to others he made the bales 45 lb, charged them by the bale. We got paid the same for bucking and stacking both.
Then there was the misery of cleaning out chicken houses 10000-15000 chickens in each. $1 a manure spreader load.
Didn’t matter if you had four teens working filling or one , we got 1 dollar a load. Hot, dry, stinking, nasty work.
Any wonder so many of us went on to get educated so we would not have to ever do it again?
A couple years ago, a friend down the road with horses was bringing in hay. It had been some time since I’d done it, and I wasn’t quite eligible for medicare yet, so no spring chicken. But, I decided to pitch in. They were doing the old square bales and it reminded me of days long gone by.
So I was pitching the bales when they come out the back of the baler or I was stacking them. It was hotter than blazes, so we had water bottles with us the whole time. We took regular water breaks, and if we felt the need, we could pull on one of those bottles at any time.
Not doing so would have been ignorant. Your body lets you know when it’s time to drink.
I didn’t die that day....but I did for the next week. I kept Bayer Aspirin in business for 2014.
Nicaraguan farm workers appear to have neurological symptoms. They get weaker as time goes on... It's not minor. It's also very unlikely it has anything to do with temperature changes or water consumption.
He was an amateur in comparison to the propagandists of today.
Also he was way more honest. He actually called himself the “propaganda minister”, whereas the fake news outlets of today dress themselves up as truth telling moralists.
Heh!.....my Dad (from upstate NY) was stationed at Polk during WWII. Which is where he met my Mom (Louisiana girl). Which is why I ended up pitching hay bales in August.
Oh, Lordy, yes!
Funny you should mention chickens. We ran a smaller scale chicken operation (about 10,000 birds total), so I have "shoveled chicken ****" also. This was before switching to beef cattle (hence the hay bales). But I'll still put pitchin' hay as worse....a shovelful of manure weighs a LOT less than a bale of hay.
Gehring’s had one field that was 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile. It was divided into quarters, all growing onions. When the onions broke surface, one weeded them on hands and knees. Because the onions were, initially so small, we had to use bare fingers becuase with gloves we might pull up the onions with the weeds. 1/4 mile long rows. Not as physical as pitching hay bales but still hot under the sun on the black muck soil.
Ah, what we did when we were young.....
The problem is they are drinking rum!
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