Scurvy!
An old sailor’s disease that emerges after months at sea without access to proper nutrients. Guess what, it’s back and on the rise in Canada! Not because we are spending months in isolation, not a fresh fruit in sight. No. The shelves are stocked. There are apples, oranges, pineapples, and even fruit juices available in every grocery store. Things a sailor could only dream of!
We are getting scurvy because we can’t afford nutritious food. According to the CBC, physicians are being warned to keep an eye out for scurvy when seeing patients of a “low socioeconomic status”. This is coming after a report was published concerning a 65-year-old woman who was diagnosed with scurvy in Toronto last year. While scurvy cases are not being tracked in Canada, they are in the U.S., and incidences of scurvy in children have tripled from 2016–2020. As of 2022, 18 per cent of families in Canada report being food insecure.
If you put two and two together, it paints a gruesome picture of bleeding gums, starving on an island in a sea of abundance. Scurvy, if left untreated, may lead to internal bleeding and death. Down with the capitalist pirates taking our health and our wages!
