The tragic magnitude of the chronic kidney failure epidemic afflicting Chichigalpa, Nicaragua, is nearly impossible to overstate - in the last 10 years, roughly half of all male deaths there were caused by the mysterious illness.
It's so bad that the tiny village of La Isla, a community of Chichigalpa sugar cane field workers, is now more commonly called La Isla de Viudas - The Island of Widows.
And the epidemic isn't limited to Nicaragua, or even Central America. It's been afflicting agricultural workers in rural pockets of El Salvador, Costa Rica, India and Sri Lanka for roughly 20 years.
Now, a World Health Organization study has discovered a culprit - glyphosate, an herbicide sold by Monsanto under the trade name "Roundup."
In first world countries, the most common causes of kidney failure are obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. But the rural workers who have been dying from "Chronic Kidney Disease of unknown etiology" (CKDu) for decades, do not generally have those risk factors, which has always led scientists to suspect an external toxin as a possible cause.
The WHO's search for that toxin in Sri Lanka revealed that the compounds created by glyphosate and metal deposits found in "hard" ground water - a geographic feature of all affected regions - were the likely cause of CKDu.
A strong association between the consumption of hard water and the occurrence of this special kidney disease has been observed, but the relationship has not been explained consistently... Although glyphosate alone does not cause an epidemic of chronic kidney disease, it seems to have acquired the ability to destroy the renal tissues of thousands of farmers when it forms complexes with a localized geo environmental factor (hardness) and nephrotoxic metals.
Meanwhile in the US, the EPA recently amended their standards to allow much higher trace levels of glyphosate in food crops - from 200 parts per million to 6,000 ppm.