Ancient disease from 3800 BC is making a comeback in children - scurvy

Ancient disease from 3800 BC is making a comeback in children (msn.com)

 

rubbish from msn again they really need to pay intelligent journalist rather than a failing A I .

 

The bit quoted above seems fairly reasonable. There has always been a few cases of scurvy around, mostly in alcoholics and people who live in isolation with very restricted diets but it is quite likely that there are ore cases now.

 

The headline may be fair. 3800 BC may be the earliest documented case. That would be from bone damage, which is of a specific pattern in scurvy. Before 3800 BC most cultures may have been based on fresh foods and there aren't that many bones. Scurvy occurs when a diet is totally restricted to stored cooked, preserved or maybe dried foods, as on ships. I can imagine that certain groups within modern cultures may eat a very restricted processed diet that does not include vitamin fortified components. It isn't just due to starvation or poverty

 

the point of my post is that they inferred that our species understood scurvy 3800 years ago . and MSN does post a lot of poor quality doom and gloom clickbait ,

 

It says scurvy can be traced back to Egypt 3800 BC (rather than 3800 years ago) which it can, by looking at the bone defects, just as we have traced forms of arthritis even in fossils millions of years old. I haven't read it all but I didn't see anything about them understanding about vitamin C 3800BC. They might have done. Medical progress is often hyped, having been known long before. Vaccination is attributed to Jenner in 1790 but in fact was known in the Middle East centuries before.