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#heat#workers#kidney#water#https#hydration#hard#disease#spinach#same

Discussion (37 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

anenefan•about 2 hours ago
I wasn't able to beat the bot wall, but I assume story close to [1] The thing of it is I'm aware of something very much the same - heat related kidney damage - something when I got a casual job with construction back in 2005, within the first couple of weeks I was warned rather pointedly by another worker who'd spent most of his working life around concreting and construction, of the dangers of long hours spend slouched over working on the concrete slabs. He had known many who'd got very ill despite following good hydration protocols [2], and knew working in the heat out on the slab came with this real risk. I being a new chum was dressed in heavy full length clothing, he generally wore cooler clothing - light shorts and short sleeved shirt which wasn't protocol for the job.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davereddick_mysterious-kidney...

[2] Most labouring job sites I've been at in the 00s at least always had a very prominent chart regarding urine colour and the dangers of dehydration, and heat stroke. As such most workers at various sites I've worked at being much more aware of urine colour regarding dehydration than most of the medical staff I encountered at the hospital my Mum died in.

Edit: Forgot to mention my locale is North Queensland Australia - it gets fairly hot though summers.

wlesieutre•about 2 hours ago
Can’t help that the state government is actively undermining local protections for workers dealing with heat dangers

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/16/texas-heat-wave-wate...

lukan•about 1 hour ago
"The law will nullify ordinances enacted by Austin in 2010 and Dallas in 2015 that established 10-minute breaks every four hours so that construction workers can drink water and protect themselves from the sun"

Wow, that is the absolute bare minimum and they even remove that.

spiderfarmer•about 1 hour ago
The government in the US isn’t for the people.
N_Lens•41 minutes ago
The government in the US is for people (corporations).
sneak•16 minutes ago
No government in any place is for the people that aren’t the people that comprise the government.

They will, of course, all tell you otherwise.

conductr•15 minutes ago
I’m in Texas and am around construction. The Mexican dudes can go all day with very little water. They tease my for my hydration and I’m not working half as hard as them. Then I see the urine they leave behind (usually left in drink bottles) and it makes my kidneys hurt.

Anyways, there’s a cultural machismo amongst the Hispanic laborers that hydration is for putos. They do this with gloves too. I’ll offer gloves when handling materials and they always laugh and say no. Like their calluses hands are their resume. I have soft doctor like hands with no calluses so I do nothing without gloves.

newtwentysix•29 minutes ago
p_wall byp_ss link: https://archive.ph/h66Jg

I am not sure whether any recent restrictions against this site here.

paulcole•about 2 hours ago
> I wasn't able to beat the bot wall

Most people have access to at least one 16-digit code that will do the trick.

anenefan•about 2 hours ago
Well what that 16 digit code might be I am unaware. I used to be able to unpick java based stuff to bypass walls but these days I really just don't try too hard, typically a site these days isn't a single site but uses other external services - I have many such services denied for scraping PII needlessly.

I could try a different browser - but in the time I wait for the site to decide if I'm not a bot, if I'm that invested, I've already done a quick search of topic heading and ...

Terr_•about 2 hours ago
> Well what that 16 digit code might be I am unaware.

They're probably talking about buying a subscription with a credit card, but I'm less certain where it lies on the shared-joke versus snide-insult spectrum.

That said, not all are 16 digits. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_card_number#Issuer_ide...

creativeSlumber•about 1 hour ago
> Researchers had found signs of CKDu outside Central America, including in Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal. But it had never been documented in the United States.

I searched a bit more and found this interesting bit from an article talking about a similar epidemic in Sri Lanka.

> An analysis showed that trace metal ions such as calcium and magnesium that naturally occur in the hard water reacted with glyphosate. This meant that, instead of breaking down rapidly, glyphosate was able to persist in the environment for up to seven years in water and twenty-two years in soil.

https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/mysterious-kidney-...

ggm•about 3 hours ago
A disease which targets latinx? seems more likely its field workers, inadequate hydration and bad fluid hygene overall.

Could be culturally diet influenced as well.

My urologist after I had my first oxalate kidney stone said "you can drink a litre of water a day, or you can pay for my yacht upgrade. It's your choice" -but the main thing was to limit oxalate rich foods or take adequate citric acid alongside/soon after. Obv there are many kinds of kidney disease aside from stones, but the commonality here about 'use it or lose it' with heat, fluids, work strikes me.

kulahan•3 minutes ago
I feel like this is the medical equivalent of saying "I can't believe these guys didn't try turning it off and on again".

Like, "maybe the people whose job is to consider the cause and spread of disease never considered diet and hydration!"

Even if that is the cause, what makes you think Central Americans are unhygienic in some highly specific way that causes kidney disease? If nothing else, that's the actual answer to the question... not just randomly assuming an entire region of the world doesn't wash their hands correctly, or doesn't know how to drink enough water.

tptacek•about 3 hours ago
Hard to imagine a diet of cultural significance that would put people into lifelong dialysis, at an epidemic scale.
nine_k•about 3 hours ago
A diet that makes a particular infection easier to take root is very imaginable.
bawolff•about 2 hours ago
sure, but not if we are just suddenly seeing it now. Most cultural based diets have a long history.
riffraff•about 2 hours ago
Well there's cases of diets which came to prominence and caused issues,.from the obesity epidemic of modern west to the pellagra-riddled European countries consuming maize.

It is conceivable that social/natural changes might bring to dietary changes whose damage at scale is only visible on hindsight.

phyzome•about 2 hours ago
For your explanation to be correct, you'd have to explain why this doesn't affect field workers of other genetic background all around the world.
throwup238•about 2 hours ago
It does. This article is about Latino workers but there are well known hotspots for CKDu in Sri Lanka and India. There’s other reports of it in the rest of Asia, Middle East, and Africa but its not as well known of an issue and under reported.
card_zero•about 3 hours ago
What's the popular food that contains lots of oxalates? I don't see anyone binging on sorrel or star fruit or parsley.
christophilus•about 3 hours ago
It’s in loads of things. Peanuts, spinach, beans, chocolate, avocados, corn, soy… the list is endless. If someone is really sensitive, they can have problems with high oxalate foods. Some people seem to accumulate oxalates, meaning their problems compound, where others have no problem at all. Biology is weird.
nine_k•about 3 hours ago
Spinach. Many nuts, e.g. almonds. Many beans (including cocoa but excluding coffee). Well, potatoes!
thelastgallon•about 3 hours ago
Spinach. Maybe other leafy vegetables.
4lx87•about 2 hours ago
Spinach is very high per serving, but all sorts of foods can have high oxalates per serving. Sweet potato, Swiss chard, almonds, beets, chocolate. You'd have to consult the content per serving for all foods you consume if you're trying to avoid them.
jrootabega•about 3 hours ago
Spinach and almonds.
card_zero•about 2 hours ago
I'm frequenting clinics

'Cos I eats my spinach,

I've kidney the failure, man

bawolff•about 2 hours ago
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.

TranquilMarmot•about 2 hours ago
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.

trentor•about 2 hours ago
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.
thaeli•about 2 hours ago
A routine urinalysis has always been part of my normal annual physicals.
cratermoon•about 1 hour ago
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.
stevenwoo•about 2 hours ago
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...

sleepyguy•about 2 hours ago
Most of the roofers today in Texas are pretty damn young (16 - 30 tops). You don't really make it past that age because you're already worn out.

The crew (10 guys) that showed up to roof my house went through at least 5 cases of Gatorade, I have a fridge in the garage that I filled with drinks. I told them to help themselves after seeing them pull a hot bottle of water from one of the trucks. These guys didn't even have a cooler with cold water.

I suppose at some point water/hydration isn't good enough, they need salt and electrolytes to balance things out. They think wearing long pants and shirts acts as an insulator from the heat but in my opinion it's nuts, they need to cover up but, in the lightest possible clothing they can wear that breaths. The same goes for the landscapers who work outside all day. It wouldn't surprise me if they are dying from the heat, it is merciless here in the summer. Even the birds fly away....

profsummergig•about 3 hours ago
are these the same workers who pluck vegetables while they're being sprayed with pesticides and herbicides?
b112•about 1 hour ago
I hope not, as every pesticide spray I know cannot be used near harvest time.
soulofmischief•44 minutes ago
I worked on a small organic farm and I can attest that glyphosate was sprayed irregardless of season, because technically an adjacent unused field isn't the same field being harvested. However I can also attest to strong winds that easily carry nebulized particles across fields. I also fondly remember being provided no PPE and breathing in clouds of that shit and getting it all over my skin frequently.
EA-3167•about 3 hours ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11093537/

The best guesses are both chronic rather than single acute injuries. High heat, dehydration, hard work, exposure to nitrites and who knows what else.

It’s mysterious because the specific etiology is unclear and therefore hard to prevent, since telling field workers not to work in the heat will be ignored by all involved.

bamboozled•about 3 hours ago
I wonder if this is what regulations were for?
doc_ick•about 2 hours ago
Don’t worry, raw milk will save the day

*they said crying