Is scurvy common in the US?

[KRC]

My sister was diagnosed with scurvy when she was a kid. She was a fussy eater and wouldn’t eat her fruit or vegetables. Recently a friend of mine showed similar symptoms (bleeding gums, spots around hair follicles, exhausted all the time) and recovered very quickly after I made him take vitamins. He is a former meth-head so it’s easy to see how he could have developed severe malnutrition.

Now that we know what causes scurvy and how to prevent it, is it a common disease in industrialized nations? Does anyone have any idea what its prevalence is?

[Ravenman]

Scurvy is an illness that, though it belongs to another time, is still very much with us today even in affluent countries. It is more usually found among the elderly (who may be forgetting to eat right or whose fixed incomes restrict them to a limited diet) and alcoholics (who both forget to take care of mundane bodily needs like eating in their pursuit of demon rum and whose every cent goes towards liquor purchases). But it is also on the rise among the poor of well-off societies. The impoverished often stick to bad, unvaried diets deficient in vitamins, choosing convenience and ease of preparation over good food value. (It is possible to eat well on very little money, but doing so involves cooking dishes from scratch rather than from a mix or out of a box, a practice that is far more labor intensive and skill dependent.)

College Scurvy

[Shagnasty]

Everything that I can find just says that it is so rare in the U.S. that most doctors have never seen a case. When it does happen, it is usually in alcoholics, the elderly, or, most likely, elderly alcoholics. Here is a sample cite:

http://www.emedicine.com/ped/topic2073.htm

[CrankyAsAnOldMan]

One thing that may help children, even children with crappy diets, from suffering from scurvy is the fact that apple juice is so cheap (at least compared to other kid-friendly beverages). Nutritionally it’s not all that great, and dentists loathe it, but it does get vitamin C into kids because processors add ascorbic acid to it.

[Mirror_Image_egamI_rorriM]

There’s an article about scurvy in the latest issue of Discover magazine. It basically says the same thing about scurvy mostly occuring in the elderly and alcoholics, but it’s pretty interesting anyway.