Vitamin D Prescription- Health Benefits of Vitamin D

Martin Mittelstaedt

From Monday’s Globe and MailLast updated on Sunday, Jul. 26, 2009 09:32PM EDT

In an effort to discover new ways to fight the swine flu, the Public Health Agency of Canada intends to test the blood of people contracting the ailment to check their vitamin D levels.

The agency is taking the unconventional action to try to find out whether those with mild cases of the flu have more of the sunshine vitamin circulating in their bodies than those who develop severe or even deadly reactions to the H1N1 virus.

If researchers determine that the vitamin protects against the swine flu, it will give health authorities another line of attack against the pandemic, besides such common-sense approaches as large-scale vaccinations and hand-washing campaigns.

A finding of a link to the vitamin would mean that people could reduce the odds of being harmed by the new flu bug by simply popping a low-cost supplement that is widely available at almost every drugstore.

Scientists have long been wondering about a possible connection between vitamin D and influenza because of the striking observations in both the northern and southern hemispheres that flu is mostly a wintertime ailment. This is the period each year when sunshine isn’t intense enough to allow people to make the vitamin the natural way – in naked skin exposed to ultraviolet light – causing levels of the nutrient to plunge among those not taking supplements...read more here..