Scurvy Is Making A Resurgence And Doctors Say It’s Because Of Poor Diets

It seems that scurvy, a historical disease usually associated with sailors and pirates, is making an unanticipated comeback in Australia.

A group of diabetes patients at a major western Sydney hospital have been diagnosed with scurvy, the ABC reports.

Professor Jenny Gunton, a clinician-researcher who leads the Diabetes Centre at Westmead Hospital, discovered that a vitamin C deficiency was the reason why her patient’s wounds weren’t healing. “She just did not have a reason not to heal her ulcers, they’d been there for several months and that’s just not right,” she said.

After prodding a little further, Professor Gunton asked her patient about her dietary habits. “While she ate veggies quite a few times a week, she cooked them a lot. So [I] tested her for vitamin C and zinc levels because they are both needed for normal wound healing.”

When the diagnosis was delivered for her first patient, she went on to test around a dozen others. Two thirds of the group were also found to have extremely low vitamin C levels and were given the same diagnosis.

“When I asked about their diet, one person was eating little or no fresh fruit and vegetables, but the rest ate fair amounts of vegetables; they were simply over-cooking them, which destroys the vitamin C,” explained Professor Gunton.

(Yeah, now is probably a good time to make friends with salad.)

Scurvy – despite being (often) humorously associated with pirates – can be fatal. According to Professor Gunton, if you are severely deficient in vitamin C, you may be prone to bruising, bleeding, breaking bones and having your teeth fall out.

Further tests will be done and she hopes to discern whether scurvy is limited to diabetes sufferers, or if it’s a more widespread problem.

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