Beryllium Rickets

Rickets has been ascribed to lack of Vitamin D in foods, lack of adequate sunlight, unbalance between the calcium and phosphorus in the body, disfunction of the parathyroid glands.

Last week Professor Herbert Davenport Kay & associates of Toronto suggested in The Journal of Nutrition that beryllium, a metal related to calcium and now coming into industrial use (it strengthens and hardens aluminum alloys), may be an obscure cause of rickets. When the experimenters added as little as 2% of beryllium carbonate to the diet of rats, the rats grew humpbacked, wobbled as they walked, showed practically all the other signs of rickets. No amount of cod-liver oil, viosterol, ultraviolet light or sunlight improved their condition. Best deduction is that the beryllium combines with phosphorus, which is essential for healthy bones and muscles, forms an unassimilable beryllium phosphate, thus starves the body of phosphorus.

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