Vitamin A for child survival

Alfred Sommer went to Indonesia to study the blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency, and noticed something nobody was looking for: the mildly deficient children were dying at several times the rate of the others, of measles and diarrhoea, long before they went blind. Two cents' worth of vitamin A twice a year cut child mortality by roughly a third. The finding was resisted for years and is now standard practice; supplementation programmes reach hundreds of millions of children and are among the cheapest lives ever saved.

Part of “The Gifts of the Jews” — verified Jewish contributions to the world, with sources.