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Medical Scribblings - Thursday, 23 December 2004

HI was going through some old books the other day and came across one on instructions to a new mother on how to bring up your child. There were rather amusing bits on the type of nursery that you should have and who would be suitable as a nurse maid etc. The thing that caught my eye was the advise to take your child out for fresh air every day. It tied in with a recent bit of research which showed that babies slept better if they had been out in the sun. It seems that you need some time out of doors to reset the body’s time clock.

We all seem to crave sunshine in the winter and there are many indications that it is very important to our health. The classic illness related to shortage of sunshine is of course rickets which was very common in the old smokey Victorian cities where little sunlight penetrated. In recent years there has been interest in another condition called SAD where people become depressed and despondant in the winter.

This morning I happened to be reading an article in New Scientist about head lice. You may feel that this is not really a very Christmas type of subject but they are fascinating creatures. There are head lice and body lice and someone has gone to the trouble of looking at their DNA. The best estimate of when they split from one another is 72,000 years. This ties in quite well with human studies that suggest that modern people first migrated from Africa about 100,000 years ago. The theory goes that as they moved to these cold northern climes they started to wear clothes thus giving an opening for the body lice that live in clothing. At the same time by getting less sunlight and by covering up their skin with clothes they started to develop unheard of diseases like rickets. Thus we evolved paler skin to let in more sunlight.

The vitamin D problem has been solved in modern times by simply adding it to processed foods so it should not really matter what complexion you happen to have. For those of us lucky enough to be able to fly off to somewhere warm for a week or two in the winter there is just a word of warning. Do remember that if you have fair skin colour it was designed for the far north and will not stand up to powerful sunlight so do cover up and have a great holiday in the sun.

John Schofield