Kidney failure kills scores of children in the Gambia and Indonesia
Are two disasters, 15,000km apart, connected?
The food and drug agency of Indonesia, known as BPOM, had a grim mystery on its hands. Until recently, cases of small children suffering acute kidney injury (AKI) were vanishingly rare in the country of 276m people. But in August the number began to rise sharply and nobody was sure why. The health minister, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, says his team wondered at first whether a new variant of covid-19 might be to blame. But then came a clue from the other side of the world.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “Joining the dots”
From the October 29th 2022 edition
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