Epidemic Of Kidney Failure In Nepalese Workers In ME Previews What A Hotter Future Means [View all]

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Head nurse Rani Jha circled around her busy kidney ward, reeling off the list of patients who were too young, too sick, too many to count. There, lying against the far wall, was Tilak Kumar Shah, who had worked in construction for seven years in the Persian Gulf before collapsing. The next bed had belonged to Mohan Yadav, who had labored in Qatar — until he died two weeks earlier. Next to Jha’s cubicle, huddling quietly under a blanket, was another typical case: Suraj Thapa Magar, a shy 28-year-old who had left his mud hut in Nepal to install windows on skyscrapers in Kuwait, often dangling by a rope in the scorching, 120-degree purgatory between the sun and the desert.

Jha ran her finger through a large notebook filled with names written neatly in ink. About 20 percent of the dialysis patients at the Second Provincial Hospital in southern Nepal were healthy young men before they went abroad to work, she estimated. Why did they keep getting sick and ending up back here? “Heat,” she said.

In recent years, scientists and groups including the International Labor Organization have increasingly warned about the deadly, yet often overlooked, link between exposure to extreme heat and chronic kidney disease. Exactly how heat scars and cripples the microscopic tubes in the organs is still debated, researchers say, but the correlation is clear. That link has been observed among workers toiling in rice fields in Sri Lanka and steamy factories in Malaysia, from Central America to the Persian Gulf. As the world grows hotter and climate change ushers in more frequent and extreme heat waves, public health experts fear kidney disease cases will soar among laborers who have no choice but to work outdoors.

“These epidemics of chronic kidney disease that have surfaced … [are] just the beginning,” said Richard Johnson, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado who is studying pockets of kidney disease globally. “As it gets hotter, we expect to see these diseases emerge elsewhere.” In an April statement on climate change, the American Society of Nephrology warned that “the confluence of socioeconomic, geographic, and climate change risk factors may increase the incidence of kidney disease.” The association of kidney specialists noted that global surface temperatures are expected to rise by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by mid-century, and pointed to one population of particular concern: the global poor who must work “in an increasingly hostile outdoor environment.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/06/climate-change-heat-kidney-disease/