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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

"Putting the entire population on vitamin D supplements would be too expensive for the country’s national health service, he told me."

This seems absolutely bonkers. Vitamin D is dirt cheap, and if you can think at all beyond first-order effects, the improvement in immune health alone would likely pay for itself in terms of cost to the healthcare system.

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The amount of money lost treating sick people who now have renewed vigour to solve other problems in their life would be just too much

A year of over the counter Vitamin D is around 30 pounds. (Not including bulk discounts or administrative/distribution costs)

The population is 70 million.

So 2.1 billion pounds, about 1% of the total NHS budget.

So do Vitamin D supplements reduce healthcare costs by at least 1%

1% if the NHS budget is one thing, and 1% of healthcare costs is quite another. They are orders of magnitude different.

Presumably they are equivalent.

Cutting one by that much also cuts the other.

I get mine (2000IU & K2) from Amazon where 400 tablets are between £8 and £10.

That is before any bulk discounts are considered.

VitD as a preventative would probably be distributed through the GP system rather than the hospital system, and so be procured locally and subject to the Drug Tariff system.

I think it would be great for this to be procured centrally for great discounts and dispensed locally exempt from our tariff guides and prescription charges. After all, the NHS has great clout as it employs 1.5M people and we spend > £300B on healthcare. But the NHS changes very slowly, mostly because it’s the ultimate political football and suggesting any change means the usual suspects screaming that you’re trying to destroy it. We’ll get to preventative medicine when we’ve tried everything else.

In the 1930s, the US starting fortifying milk with vitamin D in an effort to eradicate rickets, so it's definitely doable. Learned this after moving to Germany and realizing none of the milk here has any vitamin D added.

I guess the logistics of prescribing an entire population of anything is expensive, and overkill when people can supplement it in pills or diet, or just go outside more.

"Go outside more" is absolutely a nonstarter in the places that most need this: northern latitudes in the winter.

Not only is "outside" often so cold that you need to cover enough of your skin that the sunlight would barely help, the weaker sun we get in winter just doesn't produce enough vitamin D in our bodies. That's the problem.

(Edit: "northern latitudes" can probably be replaced with "more extreme latitudes," as I believe there are some places that are far enough south that they also experience this, just at the opposite end of the year)

Which is why the Soviet government used “ultraviolet baths” to make sure that children up North got their vitamin D.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photo-of-the-day/photo/ul...

I solve this with 2 150w led corn lamps in my office!

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