Rickets Today — Children Still Need Milk and Sunshine

Rickets has been a childhood scourge for centuries. Before the Industrial Revolution in England it was a disease of the affluent, because their style of clothing and the fact that they spent most of their time indoors limited their exposure to sunlight. Later, urbanization and atmospheric pollution caused city-dwelling poor children to be more commonly affected. By the end of the 19th century, rickets was known in Europe as “the English disease.”Studies during the early part of the 20th century seemed to link both exposure to sunlight and diet to rickets, but debate about the relative importance of these . . .