Early kidney screening could save lives across the Caribbean
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CARPHA is calling on Caribbean residents to get tested early for kidney disease, warning that the region's high rates of diabetes, hypertension, and obesity are driving a growing kidney health crisis that claimed more lives per capita in several member states than almost anywhere else in the Americas.
On World Kidney Day, March 13, 2025, CARPHA issued a regional call to action urging early screening and lifestyle changes to combat the growing burden of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in the Caribbean. The agency highlighted the tight link between CKD and the region's high prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, and obesity, and pointed to existing guidelines, frameworks, and regional partnerships as the foundation of its response.
The Caribbean's kidney disease burden is not a future risk — it is a present emergency compounded by some of the highest NCD prevalence rates in the world. With more than half the regional population classified as overweight or obese, according to CARPHA, and nearly one in eight adults living with diabetes, the pipeline feeding chronic kidney disease is operating at scale. Early detection and primary care intervention offer the most cost-effective path to reducing the downstream demand for dialysis and transplant services that already strain regional health systems.
"According to CARPHA, in 2019 two member states ranked in the top 10 and nine ranked in the top 20 countries in the Americas for kidney disease death rates — a concentration that signals the Caribbean's disproportionate exposure to this chronic health crisis."
— CARPHA, March 2025
CARPHA's World Kidney Day warning deserves to be treated as exactly what it is: an alarm, not a routine advisory. The data the agency has put on record — nine member states in the Americas' top 20 for kidney disease death rates, more than half the population overweight, nearly one in eight adults living with diabetes — describes a region that is systematically producing chronic kidney disease and then scrambling to manage it at the most expensive, most damaging end of the disease pathway.
The tools exist. CARPHA has developed guidelines, frameworks, and toolkits. The partnerships with PAHO and the CARICOM Secretariat are in place. What has lagged is the political will at member state level to fund routine screening, enforce sodium reduction, and make preventive primary care genuinely accessible to the populations most at risk.
The Caribbean cannot dialyse its way out of this crisis. Governments need to move kidney health from the periphery of NCD policy to its centre — and they need to move now.
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