Grollman, a pharmacologist who has pushed for stricter regulation of herbal supplements, says he immediately phoned a Croatian colleague. Grollman was soon on a plane, expecting to learn that patients in Croatia had ingested Aristolochia-based decoctions. Instead, he learned something entirely different, and spent the next few years pulling together a binational, multidisciplinary research team that not only tracked the pathway of exposure, but also eyeballed the compounds that form when Aristolochia couples with DNA, thus enabling the identification of the mutational fingerprint of endemic nephropathy.
In the process, his team developed a hypothesis for ongoing work: Black houses, those desolate symbols of families dispersed by what was once a mysterious toxin, may not be confined to an isolated smidgen of central Europe.
The first laboratory findings of what is now known as endemic nephropathy are uremia, low-molecular proteinuria, anemia that is more severe than is typical of early-stage chronic ...
