COLOMBO, 15 July 2008 (IRIN) - Researchers are struggling to pinpoint the factors making people in several rice-growing districts vulnerable to the debilitating illness.
Medical researchers say the numbers have been steadily climbing since the high prevalence of the disease was first noted eight years ago in North Central Province, where over half the population is engaged in agriculture. Besides North Central Province, the ailment is prevalent in the North-Western, the Eastern and Uva provinces.
“The problem first came to light in Anuradhapura [a district in the North Central Province] around 2000,” Navaratnasingam Janakan, the consultant epidemiologist at the Health Ministry's Epidemiology Unit, told IRIN. “It is an emerging health problem,” he said, adding that it seriously jeopardised the health of those who got it, and the high economic cost of treatment “is a burden to the patient, family, community and health system”.
Statistics from the Provincial Directorate of Health Services reveal that in 2003 just over 1,300 patients with chronic kidney disease received treatment in the worst-hit North Central Province, with almost 200 patients dying of renal failure that year.
The most mystifying feature of the problem is that most of those affected are farmers, and mostly male members of farming families. According to health officials, many of them do not have the pre-existing conditions of hypertension or diabetes that usually lead to renal disease and failure.
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