Chronic kidney disease

Abstract

In his review article in the March 2015 edition of
CME, Prof. A M Meyers refers to chronic kidney
disease as ‘an important disease group that threatens
health’. I fully concur with this observation and
wish to go a step further and assert that kidney
disease, together with other related non-
communicable diseases
(NCDs), poses not only a threat to health but also to the
overall development of South Africa (SA). It is now almost 4 years
since the adoption of the Political Declaration of the High-level
Meeting of the General Assembly on the Prevention and Control
of Non-
communicable Diseases (September 2011), where it
was emphatically stated that member States that have signed the
Declaration (including SA) ‘Acknowledge that the global burden
and threat of non-communicable diseases constitutes one of the
major challenges for development in the twenty-first century,
which undermines social and economic development throughout
the world, and threatens the achievement of internationally
agreed development goals’.