May 20, 2016
By Bruce Finley

Global warming (click here) may be taking a toll on human lives, such as low-income farmers in hot, rural tropical regions, Colorado-based scientists have found.
The problem is dehydration, which leads to kidney problems. Kidneys filter toxins and other waste out of blood.
"There's warming in the same areas where we're seeing kidney disease increases," said Henry Diaz, a longtime National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate scientist who co-authored a study published this week.
"We want to bring this to the attention of the scientific community, as well as the public, that there may be a connection between climate and health conditions — kidney disease in tropical areas where the high temperatures have been increasing relatively fast," Diaz said.
The World Health Organization and other international institutions for years have warned that climate change could threaten people, largely through disease spread by insects such as mosquitoes. And extreme weather such as heat waves and floods leads to emergency-room visits and deaths. But this study by scientists at the University of Colorado, NOAA and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ranks among the first to make a connection between global warming and a particular health condition.
The scientists focused on areas where weather data show maximum temperatures increasing and gathered health data on kidney disease and deaths....