Why is Mr Sun sad?




News item: Rickets returns to Britain.

Was it rickets that ailed "Tiny Tim" Cratchit, the waif who stirred Scrooge's conscience in A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens's 1843 classic? His symptoms certainly fit with the disease. So does his milieu: rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D, was rife among those who toiled from dawn to dusk in the dingy factories of Victorian Britain.

Now, astonishingly, vitamin D deficiency is again becoming a significant health concern in rich countries. Reversing this trend is not difficult, in principle. Just half an hour a day in the sun during summer lets our skin make enough vitamin D to last all year.

In the UK, cases of childhood rickets have leapt from 147 in 1997 to 762 in 2010. The story may be similar in the US: a study published by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, found that only 5 to 13 per cent of breastfed infants and 20 to 37 per cent of formula-fed babies got enough vitamin D to meet the recommended daily dose.

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Long technical note: The activities of the small humans (known as "kids") in the lower picture will be puzzling to progressive modern enlightened humans. I shall endeavor to explain these activities in a way that can actually be followed by modern humans.

1. The "kids" first placed their pedal extremities on the floor, straightened their lower extremities, and formed their torsos into an upright position. This was known as "standing".

2. The "kids" then alternately rotated their lower extremities in a way that produced forward locomotion. This was known as "walking".

3. The "kids" directed their "walking" toward a portal in the walls of their houses, and turned the control knob on this portal. The portal then rotated into a position that revealed a mysterious Terra Incognita, which they called "outdoors" in their quaint primitive way.

4. Continuing the "walking" process, the "kids" proceeded forward through Terra Incognita, which was somehow thoroughly familiar to them. When they located a large flat area (called a "vacant lot" in their laughably ancient tongue), they used their optical sensory equipment to examine the ecosystem for other small humans.

5. If other small humans were already present on the "vacant lot", the target activity could then proceed. The target activity, known as "playing", is what the lower picture displays. The small humans used various homemade or commercially developed devices which resembled the devices used by adults; if the homemade device bore little actual resemblance, it didn't matter because the small humans of that prehistoric era possessed a mysterious extra capacity known as "imagination". Using this strange "imagination", they were able to rehearse adult activities and explore Terra Incognita. The activity known as "playing" had numerous side effects, including an elevation of the distal corners of the oral organ (known as "smiling") and a peculiar sort of repetitive pulmonary spasm known as "laughing".

6. While they engaged in "playing" they also absorbed sunlight, fresh air, bacteria from the soil, other microbes from animals and from the other small humans. These absorptions, which we now know to be lethal and toxic, were believed in primitive times to be "healthy" and to induce "immune responses".

Stupid, weren't they? Of course we know now that the only way to induce "health" and "immune responses" is with expensive genetically-modified pharmaceuticals and organ transplants.
  ¶ 4:41 AM