Nicole Pinkerton, MNIT Director of Education was invited to participate in Los Angeles’ celebration of World Kidney Day. World Kidney Day (WKD) is a global health awareness campaign focusing on the importance of our kidneys and reducing the frequency and impact of kidney disease and its associated health problems worldwide. This campaign is celebrated every year on the second Thursday of March in more than 100 countries on 6 continents.
In Los Angeles, this year we celebrated our third World Kidney Day community conference on March 12, 2009 at the California Science Center at 8:30am. Our conference will be “A community dialogue to help increase awareness of kidney disease and mobilize communities to become active in the promotion of prevention, early detection and treatment of all forms of kidney disease including transplant and dialysis”
Some of the facts you may not know about kidney disease are:
- 26 million American adults have CKD and millions of others are at increased risk.
- Of the 26 million Americans who have CKD, 20 million don’t know they have kidney disease.
- The number of people with kidney failure is doubling every year.
- 1 out of 3 people with CKD are African-Americans.
- Hispanics are twice as likely to develop kidney disease as non-Hispanic whites.
In Los Angeles, 1 out of 8 of every Angelinos suffers from chronic kidney disease.