This is the first of what may turn out to be two or more posts on Vitamin D today, and the focus is epidemiology. The next one will be a doozie, but this is an excellent set up. I had not known the background of Dr. John Cannell of the excellent resource, the Vitamin D Council until I stumbled upon this amazing account over the weekend. You're best off reading that, which might require 15 minutes of your time, but here's a few excepts to wet your appetite. In early April of 2005, after a particularly rainy spring, an influenza epidemic (epi: upon, demic: people) exploded through the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane where I have worked for the last ten years. It was not the pandemic (pan: all, demic: people) we all fear, just an epidemic. The world is waiting and governments are preparing for the next pandemic. A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would tear the fabric of American society. Our entire country might resemble the...