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LIN CEO Jason Glaser was recently in Nepal with ARTE shooting a documentary on the plight of migrant Nepalese workers returning home with heat-driven kidney disease.
Many from Nepal go overseas to Southeast Asia and the Gulf States to work on large construction projects. In places like Qatar, which has been building new stadiums and infrastructure for World Cup 2022, working conditions are notoriously brutal. Workers are frequently exposed to extreme temperatures with little to no occupational protections and suffer even further under exploitative labor contracts that make it near impossible to switch employers or leave the country without their employers’ permission.
There have been many reports from Nepal-based clinicians and nephrologists of young, previously healthy men returning home after working on these construction projects with kidney diseases so severe that they require transplantation or dialysis. These heat-driven kidney diseases are caused by repeated episodes of heat stress and dehydration and are increasingly being found among young manual laborers in hot environments at the base of some of the most profitable industries on earth.
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While in Nepal, Glaser had the opportunity to collaborate directly with Sweta Koirla of the Nepal Development Society (NeDS). This organization has been responding to this crisis in Nepal and providing community health services and resources to those affected. Together with Nabil Bank, they presented a workshop on Climate Change and Worker Health to educate on protecting migrant workers at risk of preventable illness and injury abroad. The workshop highlighted the need to:
- Acquire and analyze data on the current health and socioeconomic situation among returned workers. This effort will begin through collaboration with the National Kidney Center at the clinic level and expand into a community-based study in Pokhara.
- Provide workers with training materials on what to expect overseas, what the risks are, what they can do to protect themselves, and what their employers should provide them with so that they are protected.
- Engagement with host countries and employers through online training based on occupational heat stress data that LIN has collected for over a decade.
We look forward to ongoing collaboration with NeDS, the National Kidney Center, Nabil Bank, and other Nepal-based researchers, clinicians, and community advocates to ensure workers in Nepal are granted the protections and dignity that every human deserves.
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