Determining the unique environmental and health challenges faced by racial and ethnic subgroups is another way to help target interventions. Take chronic kidney disease, for instance. Across the U.S. population, diabetes and heart disease are major risk factors for chronic kidney disease.31 Studies among the Navajo in the Southwest have found an additional, unexpected risk factor for this group—decades of exposure to uranium mining activities and drinking water contaminated by mine waste.32,33 Interventions to reduce environmental exposures may be more suitable than pushing blood pressure–lowering drugs, says Johnnye Lewis, a toxicologist at the University of New Mexico and director of the Navajo Uranium Assessment and Kidney Health Project.
