A Balkan Riddle's Serendipitous Solution

摘要

For researchers puzzling over a mysterious kidney disease in Central America dubbed CKDu (see p. 143), a tale from the Balkans offers inspiration and some cautions. In the late 1950s, reports started coming out of southeastern Europe about a kidney disease afflicting rural communities near tributaries of the Danube River. Balkan endemic nephropathy, a 1966 article in The Lancet declared, was "clearly a big public-health problem" whose cause "is utterly obscure and has excited much speculation." Solving the mystery took half a century-and led down multiple blind alleys.