Why is Iodine deficiency disorder not being recognized in the U.S? True, we don't see many people with goiters running around, but other manifestations of chronic, long term iodine deficiency are legion. With less than 1/2 commercial salt being iodized now, with bromide in our baked goods, fluoride in our water ad nauseum, can full-on IDD be far off? Is it here already, minus the most obvious manifestation, the goiter?

from a doctoral thesis, published 1990, exploring iodine deficiency disorder(IDD), & long standing resistance to acknowledgment of IDD in the mountainous regions of Spain. Many factors came into play here, from a notable medical figure's perception of the population as his pet guinea pigs to cultural view of the afflicted as "cursed by wolves" to the usual medical trauma-based response rather than preventative measures to "Medicine for the Rich, Charity for the Poor"...


http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft2d5nb1b2&chunk.id=d0e115&to...


key point: " In other words, nutritional deficiency works systematically to make all the members of an endemic community-regardless of the degree of affliction in any particular individual-more vulnerable to exploitation."

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"A simple, timely action in the 1920s—the iodization of ordinary table salt —would have made the writing of this book unnecessary. But people in iodine-deficient regions of Spain needlessly suffered until the early 1980s, and in many regions of the globe continue to suffer, the chronic and often degenerative consequences of endemic goiter and cretinism. These are the two most well-known manifestations of the set of diseases coming to be known as iodine deficiency disorders, or IDD. A nutrition deficiency disease, IDD is manifested in a wide spectrum of afflictions that iodized salt is effective in preventing.

While the iodization of salt is a simple matter, the reasons for the failure to adopt this measure are complex. It is my task here to contribute to our understanding of health systems and medical care by explaining the complex of reasons that account for such inaction or delay.

The number of victims needlessly afflicted with IDD in Spain over these sixty years is not, even in that country, small. Over this time span, we conservatively estimate at least 10 million Spaniards to have been at risk of IDD; 50,000 have been sufficiently afflicted to have sought treatment.[1]

But inaction and delay have much wider—indeed worldwide—implications. For the failure to take the preventive action here examined is, in respect to IDD and a host of other preventable diseases, repeated over and over again, year after year, in country
after country. According to the most recent United Nations estimate, 800 million people around the globe are at present at risk of IDD (Hetzel 1989). This "simple matter" has very large implications indeed....

...Greene did not argue, and on this point he was clearly misunderstood (Vayda 1979), that iodine deficiency caused social and
racial stratification. He and his colleague did, however, argue that widespread behavioral deficit stemming from iodine deficiency served vested interests. For just as IDD produces defects in individuals and, consequently, hierarchies among villagers, it also reinforces social stratification already existing at local, regional, and national levels. In other words, nutritional deficiency works systematically to make all the members of an endemic community—regardless of the degree of affliction in any particular individual—more vulnerable to exploitation."

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