Medicine: End of Rickets?

Every child can be given all the vitamin D it needs in one big dose at the beginning of each winter, and rickets can be conquered once & for all. That was the proposition Dr. Henry John Gerstenberger of Western Reserve presented to members of the American Medical Association last week. He reminded them of the shock ing but well-known fact that thousands of U.S. children are still weak, potbellied and spindly, because many mothers do not know enough to give their babies a daily teaspoon of vitamin-D-rich cod-liver oil or halibut-liver oil as a sunshine substitute in the dark winter months. And because many children refuse to take the nasty stuff.

Instead of dosing children with oil (it seems to lose much of its power in the digestive tract), Dr. Gerstenberger injects it into their buttocks. He does not use fish oil, but its essential element—synthetic vitamin D3, dissolved in a cubic centimeter of cottonseed oil. The vitamin is gradually absorbed into the child's blood stream.

Dr. Gerstenberger has cured 15 bowlegged, pigeon-breasted babies in Cleveland with one large injection each. He also protected 159 out of 160 healthy infants from rickets over this last winter. The injections are far cheaper than cod-liver oil, which is somewhat scarce at present.* For best results, he finds that the first injection should be given when a baby is a month old, and that no sunlamp or other vitamin treatment is necessary.

Spraying school children's noses to block off the virus of infantile paralysis is a popular preventive. It is also futile, says Dr. Albert Bruce Sabin of Cincinnati. The virus does not get in through the nose, but through the mouth.