Muammar Al Khadafi

Despite having been all but eradicated in the UK after advances in health and nutrition, new cases of the crippling bone disease Rickets are being seen in Cardiff.

The disease, caused by a vitamin D deficiency, is considered something from the Victorian era, and an illness which was once all but confined to the history books. Not any more, with health professionals in Cardiff reporting increasing incidences of the disease.

Rickets, which can cause stunted growth and physical deformities, had largely disappeared in the previous century.

Statistics are not kept for how many cases are reported since it is not a notifiable disease, but current affairs program Eye On Wales has learnt that healthcare professionals in South Wales are reporting multiple new incidents of the illness.

Like Tuberculosis, a disease which was once something almost consigned to the annals of history, Rickets is making a return and once more becoming something which will blight twenty first century Britain.

The figures for tuberculosis are telling - "There is a particularly heavy burden of disease among people who were not born in the UK : this group accounts for 84% of TB notifications in London and predominantly feature in people of Indian or black African ethnicity - http://www.londonhp.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/TB-Case-for-change.pdf

Partly the resurgence in cases can be attributed to poverty, and the continually declining standards of life within the UK, but there are other reasons.

"You get women living in certain communities that perhaps don't go out much because of religious, cultural traditions." - Doctor Elspeth Webb, Cardiff university.

"You don't see rickets in rich, advantaged, educated, middle-class South Asian people. So it's a mixture of religious, cultural practices with poverty." she adds.

(Quotes taken from the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-14256950 )

Says it all really.

*Hat tip to the Clubman blog for first pointing out the cases of Rickets in Wales.