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 Global warming will likely exacerbate epidemics of chronic kidney disease seen recently in hot, rural regions of the world, according to a new assessment by an international team of researchers, including two from the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Chronic kidney disease caused by heat stress and dehydration appears to be increasing in communities in the Americas, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East as regional temperatures rise, the authors wrote in an assessment published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology this month. 

Chronic kidney disease, or CKD, means a loss in kidney function, problematic because our kidneys filter waste and excess fluid from blood. 

“Temperature increases add an additional dimension to this health issue,” said Balaji Rajagopalan, a climate change expert, Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at ����������-Boulder and professor of engineering.

“In this paper, we find that in some places—mostly tropical countries where you have weak public health systems—temperatures are going up and people in farm sectors are vulnerable,” Rajagopalan said.