Wellington boy diagnosed with scurvy: A modern case of the 'pirate disease'

You could be forgiven for thinking scurvy was something only pirates got, back when wooden ships and meagre rations were the norm. But recently, a Wellington family received a diagnosis that sounds straight out of the 18th century: their five-year-old autistic son, who had been surviving on a diet of chicken and biscuits, came down with full-blown scurvy.

It’s the kind of story that stops you in your tracks. The boy, like many on the spectrum, had extreme food aversions—no fruit, no veg, just those two staples. And while his parents thought they were keeping him fed, his body was quietly screaming out for vitamin C. The result? Bleeding gums, bruising, leg pain so severe he stopped walking. Classic signs you’d read about in a history book, or maybe in Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, where those poor souls likely perished from the same deficiency in the Arctic ice.

Not just a thing of the past

Doctors at Wellington Hospital were stunned. Scurvy is so rare these days that it’s often missed—they call it a "forgotten disease." But once they ran the blood tests and saw the near-zero vitamin C levels, it all clicked. They even flicked through Images in Clinical Medicine: Selections from The New England Journal of Medicine, where you can see the telltale corkscrew hairs and perifollicular haemorrhages that confirm the diagnosis. It’s an image you don’t forget.

The boy’s case isn’t isolated, either. Paediatricians say they’re seeing more kids with unusual nutritional gaps, especially those with sensory issues. It makes you think: we laugh at pirate stereotypes—those scurvy rascals in books like The Pirate Cruncher, always yelling about the "scurvy dog"—but the real thing is no joke. It’s painful, debilitating, and entirely preventable.

What to watch for

If your little one is a picky eater, especially if they’ve got autism or a sensory processing disorder, it’s worth keeping an eye out. Scurvy doesn’t announce itself with a parrot on its shoulder; it creeps up slowly. Here’s what to look for:

• Unexplained fatigue or irritability – your child might seem "lazy" or cranky, but it could be their body struggling.
• Bleeding gums or loose teeth – even if they brush regularly.
• Bruising easily – those mysterious purple marks that show up for no reason.
• Joint and muscle pain – especially in the legs, sometimes making walking difficult.
• Rough, bumpy skin or corkscrew hairs – a classic sign that vitamin C is missing.

The good news? It’s dead simple to fix. A few weeks of vitamin C supplements and some creative sneaking of kiwifruit into smoothies, and the kid in Wellington is already back on his feet. But it’s a wake-up call for all of us. We tend to think of malnutrition as something that happens elsewhere, to people in famine zones. In reality, it can happen in your own living room, one chicken nugget at a time.

So next time you’re reading a bedtime story—maybe even The Pirate Cruncher with its colourful seadogs—take a moment to glance at your own child’s plate. Are they getting any colour? Because the real scurvy rascals aren’t in storybooks; they’re the invisible deficiencies that creep up on our kids when we’re not looking.