Consider the latest news out of Chicago. Are we going through the Great Relearning**, Part 2?
Rickets returns as kids' bones weaker.
Rickets is a softening of the bones in children potentially leading to fractures and deformity.
Usually a disease seen only in developing countries, in most cases it can be easily cured with milk, sunshine and exercise. In the absence of vitamin D, either from sunshine or from supplements, calcium can not be absorbed by the body.
But cases of full-blown rickets are just the red flag: Bone specialists say possibly millions of seemingly healthy children aren't building as much strong bone as they should, a gap that may leave them more vulnerable to bone-cracking osteoporosis later.
''This potentially is a time-bomb,'' says Dr. Laura Tosi of Children's National Medical Center in Washington.
That means parents have to insist that their kids drink their fortified milk, turn off the TV or computer and go outside and play.
Otherwise, they will grow up fat, with bowed legs, frequent fractures, deformed chests or curved spines, like this poor 2-year-old with rickets. 
***The Great Relearning comes from a brilliant essay by Tom Wolfe who observed that many social problems are the result of a large-scale rejection of well-established principles that were generally accepted by everyone until the 1960s.
In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the psychedelic movement. At the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? ... The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero... And now , in 1968, they were relearning... the laws of hygiene... by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
When my kids were little (under the age of 4 - so still of an age when one would pick them up periodically) I noticed something strange. My kids had very heavy bones... they were thin and ate like food was going out of style, they ran and played, but they were much heavier than their thinness would suggest.
So, when picking them up, I was used to "heaving". What I would forget is that no other child I picked up was like that! I nearly tossed some kids into the air they were so light for their size. It was as if their bones weighed nothing! Very disconcerting when you're used to nice solid children. But I have a feeling that neither of my kids will ever have bone problems like the children you're talking about.
And I just saw the other day, some moronic actress or model or whatever was exhorting parents to NOT give children milk... Sheesh. And all the idiots will listen to her because she's famous. (famously stupid I'd say)
Posted by: Teresa at November 27, 2007 6:43 PM