A mysterious form of chronic kidney disease is killing thousands of sugar cane workers each year in Central America, Sasha Chavkin and Ronnie Greene report for iWatch News. Chronic kidney disease usually develops over many years as a complication of high blood pressure and diabetes. In the sugar cane workers, the kidneys degenerate rapidly in patients who have neither hypertension nor diabetes. One patient Chavkin and Greene interviewed for the piece was just 19 years old. “Sugarcane nephropathy,” as some experts call the new syndrome, has already killed his father and his grandfather and stricken three of his brothers, all sugarcane workers.

[Photo credit: Lon&Queta, Creative Commons.]