ERA-EDTA 2019 | Professor Raymond Vanholder and Professor Mehmet Sever received the 2019 ISN Bywaters Award

The Bywaters Award was established by the International Society of Nephrology (ISN) to recognize outstanding contributions to the understanding of acute kidney injury. The recipient of the Bywaters Award is honored for lifetime achievement in the field of Acute Kidney Injury. 

This year, two former council member of the ERA-EDTA received the ISN Bywaters Award: Professor Raymond Vanholder from Ghent, Belgium, President of the ERA-EDTA in 2011-2014 (and council member from 2000-2003), and Professor Mehmet Sukru Sever, from Istanbul, Turkey, ERA-EDTA Council member between 2012-2015. Both nephrologists are internationally renowned for their numerous studies on acute kidney injury (AKI) and their ‘milestone publications’ in high-ranking journals including ‘The Lancet’. Vanholder and Sever often worked together and published a number of joint papers, e.g. the European Renal Best Practice Guideline ‘Recommendations for the management of crush victims in mass disasters’, which aimed to assist medics, paramedics and rescue team members who provide care during disasters. Crush syndrome describes a medical condition characterized by hypovolemic shock, hyperkalemia, infections and AKI.

AKI, a sudden loss of kidney function, is a life-threatening condition which is reversible if treated early. Treating AKI promptly during environmental disasters poses a logistical and clinical challenge of epic proportions. ‘Planning the activities of rescue teams and overcoming the enormous difficulties that these self-sacrificing teams face in extreme situations, where disasters isolate people in dire need of help from the rest of the world, is a challenge demanding talent, flexibility and the capacity to deploy a task force prepared to take risks and to face the unexpected’, explains Professor Carmine Zoccali, current President of the ERA-EDTA. ‘Raymond Vanholder and Mehmet Server have made outstanding contributions towards rationalizing the planning of interventions in extreme situations such as environmental disasters. They are truly heirs of Eric Bywaters, a British clinician who, during the last world war, studied casualties whose limbs had been trapped by falling masonry and who developed fatal kidney failure after being rescued. Bywaters showed that timely administration of alkaline fluids could keep the patient alive until the kidneys could heal. He was also the first to introduce the artificial kidney to the UK for patients with kidney damage. We are delighted that both have been recognized for their commitment and have received the 2019 ISN Bywaters Award.’

The awards were presented this April at WCN 2019 in Melbourne.