Comparación del escenario de exposición a tóxicos para Nefropatía Mesoamericana (Enfermedad Renal Crónica ERC) entre Costa Rica y Panamá y su correlación con la salud de la población afectada.

More and more people are diagnosed with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) in Costa Rica. As
counted up to March 2019, 27,000 costaricans with this condition are treated in a hospital of the
Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS) throughout the country. The incidence rate (new cases
per year) went from 133.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2016 to 244.6 in 2018. Mortality from this
cause has also increased, since in the last ten years it went from 600 annual deaths to 1,800 today.
In Costa Rica, it has been identified that the cantons of Cañas and Bagaces have rates higher than
the national average, Bebedero from Cañas district being the one with the highest rate calculated
at 450 per 100,000 inhabitants. In Panama the situation is no less worrying, on average 46 people
die from this cause every month throughout the country. Data updated to 2019 indicate that in
Panama there are 26,087 patients with chronic kidney disease, of which 55.34% are men and
44.66% are women. The province of Coclé has the highest CKD prevalence rate in the country.
According to data from 2018, conglomerates of morbidity and mortality from chronic kidney disease
have been identified in this province that exceed three and four times the national average. The
World Health Organization has considered that in Central America the disease is entirely
geographical. The project will consist of technical-scientific cooperation to compare exposure to
environmental toxins between the two countries that share the same pathology, Mesoamerican
Nephropathy, a special type of Chronic Renal Insufficiency (CKD) that mainly affects young people
from both countries, looking correlation of environmental variables with the health of the affected
population. The cooperation seeks that, on the one hand, Panama can build its scenario of exposure
of the disease to environmental toxins typical of a zone of volcanic influence in the central area of
its country, specifically the province of Coclé, taking as reference the variables analyzed by Costa
Rica, within the framework of the research carried out by the researcher Benedicto Valdés in his
doctoral thesis called: "Analysis of nephrotoxic environmental factors and their relationship with the
high population incidence of Chronic Kidney Disease in Panama ”. For other hand, Costa Rica is
going to set up the exposure scenario for the canton of Bagaces based on what has already been
determined for the canton of Cañas, places with the highest incidence of cases in Costa Rica, and
it is also sought that Costa Rica can to determine if the genesis of the problem that the country has
the same as that which can be observed in the cases of Panama. The project seeks, to reinforce
the exposure scenario, the quantification of nephrotoxic heavy metals in the soils of the highincidence volcanic areas of both countries.

Estudiar relaciones causales de la Nefropatía
Mesoamericana (ERC) a partir de un Escenario de Exposición Toxicológica
Ambiental construido en Costa Rica y en Panamá.

Biotecnología Médica
Investigación en salu