Hacker News Reader

Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

Did these people never have a blood test/urine test prior to this? Normal Kidney disease should show up on tests long before the stage of collapsing.

I'm not a doctor, but if its sudden onset, all in a similar socio-economic-cultutal group, i would assume there was some sort of toxin they were all exposed to, perhaps at work.

View on HN

I assume that they do not have regular access to medical care, especially if they are immigrant workers.

Anecdotally, I have chronic kidney disease that would not have shown up on routine bloodwork / urinalysis. Only after multiple acute episodes did I get a biopsy for a diagnosis, and even that took a year of bouncing between specialists in a big city with good healthcare.

I get doing a blood panel once a year or so if you are not scraping by but never heard of doing a urine test without indication.

A routine urinalysis has always been part of my normal annual physicals.

Bold of you to think undocumented workers making subsistence wages under a brutal system have access to annual physicals, much less the sort of continuously documented medical history needed to spot and address abnormalities before they become life-threatening emergencies.

It’s mentioned in the article it’s been documented in Central America for more than ten years in manual laborers but with few clues - possibly genetic predisposition combined with heat and physical exertion. It’s different types of manual labor so toxin exposure seems unlikely unless it turns out all of them got poisoned doing the same type of manual labor at one point and I would speculate they would have figured it out by now in Central America if it was toxin exposure.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/26/7538343...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com