We choose ... to find answers to a rising tide of kidney disease
In Sri Lanka and other hot climates around the world, an alarming spike in kidney disease among young men has raised concerns about the health impacts of a warming planet. It’s a mystery captured in the very name of the ailment — chronic kidney disease of unknown origin, or CKDu — but the risks appear most acute for people working outdoors in hot, dry conditions.
At DGHI, environmental scientist Nishad Jayasundara, Ph.D., and nephrologist Anna Strasma, M.D., are leading an interdisciplinary effort to unravel the disease’s cause and find ways to protect workers. “This work is at the forefront of understanding how environmental conditions — particularly heat stress — impact the health of the outdoor labor force,” says Jayasundara, the Juli Plant Grainger assistant professor of global environmental health at Duke. In Sri Lanka, he and collaborators are working closely with government and health officials to implement community interventions, including improving access to clean drinking water and ramping up monitoring of kidney health.
Strasma, an affiliate faculty member who completed DGHI’s Master of Science in Global Health program as a Global Pathway Fellow in 2023, is a key collaborator on the work in Sri Lanka. She has also launched research on kidney health among seasonal migrant farm workers in North Carolina, who face similar threats from heat stress and dehydration. The project is supported by funds from the G. Ralph Corey Legacy Award, established by DGHI’s Hubert-Yeargan Center for Global Health, and the Duke Department of Medicine.
Those sources have filled some gaps in funding, but Strasma says creativity and flexibility will be essential to sustaining this kind of work over longer periods of time. “The global health community has a unique strength in that we have always had to adapt in order to work with limited resources in challenging environments,” she says. “Those strengths are being called on even more now.”
Read more about Strasma and Jayasundara and their efforts to protect vulnerable workers in this October 2024 article, published by the Duke School of Medicine.