Thousands of people in the Asian island nation of Sri Lanka have been struck by a mysterious and deadly form of kidney disease. A new study points to a likely cause – pesticides and fertilisers.
Tucked away in Sri Lanka’s North Central Province is the village of Halmillawetiya. A pebbled path connects small houses of brick and mud set among coconut palms and other tropical trees.
Sampath Kumarasinghe, aged 21, lives here with his widowed mother and extended family.
I find him resting on a wooden bench in the front yard. His mother, P Dingirimenike, sits close by, talking and cutting areca nuts, which people chew like tobacco. The sounds of a radio waft from the house.
Kumarasinghe greets me with a “Hello”.
I ask him how he is doing. “I’m fine,” he says.
But you can tell he isn’t fine. Despite the brutal heat, he’s wearing a wool hat. He speaks softly, and his movements are slow for someone his age.
Like most people here, Kumarasinghe is a rice farmer, but recently he hasn’t had the strength to work on his farm.
Kumarasinghe’s kidneys are failing. They are no longer filtering waste from his bloodstream.
“My body is weak,” he says.
He is being kept alive by dialysis, a procedure he receives twice a week at a regional hospital. He is hoping to get a kidney transplant.
Kumarasinghe is one of thousands of people in the North Central Province suffering from chronic kidney disease. According to the Sri Lankan Ministry of Health, 15% of the population here is affected. Most of them are rice farmers.
The disease first came to the attention of physicians at the public hospital in the provincial capital, Anuradhapura, about 20 years ago.
“They started noticing that there [were] a number of deaths due to kidney disease,” says kidney specialist Dr Rajeewa Dassanayake.
“And the physicians at the time noticed that this was not happening in the rest of the country.”
Dassanayake says these patients didn’t fit the typical profile. They didn’t have diabetes or high blood pressure, the common causes of chronic kidney disease worldwide.
To distinguish this illness from the more common form of chronic kidney disease, the Sri Lankan government labelled it chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (meaning, of unknown cause) – CKDu for short.
“Unfortunately, for CKDu, there’s still no specific treatment,” says Dassanayake.
And there has been no known way to prevent it.
