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THOUSANDS DYING FROM CHRONIC RENAL INSUFFICIENCY IN NICARAGUA; AGROCHEMICALS SUSPECTED BUT NOT PROVEN.

Article Excerpt
About 160 km northwest of Managua lies the town of Chichigalpa, where some 2,000 people suffer from chronic renal insufficiency (CRI). The disease is eventually fatal. This is sugarcane country. The CRI sufferers are current and former employees of two sugar mills. During the past 30 years, says a workers' group, more than 560 employees of just one of the mills have died of the condition.

The mills, San Antonio and Monterrosa, deny responsibility for the illnesses. Most people in the area agree that the cause is chemicals used in the fields, but the mills contend that no scientific proof has been presented in any of the workers' lawsuits brought against them.

Successive Nicaraguan governments have acknowledged the lack of scientific evidence. The local causes of CRI are officially unknown. The current government, however, runs a CRI unit at the Julio Duran Zamora Health Center in Chichigalpa. Nephrologist Edwin Reyes of the Ministry of Health has been monitoring the situation for ten years. The figure of 2,000 people affected is an increase from 800 in 2004, when he began to count cases. Reyes told El Nuevo Herald newspaper in Miami that neither the government nor the mills have investigated the causes of the disease. "I don't understand why not," he told the reporter....