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Is a new global epidemic of rickets being confused with mistaken findings of child abuse?

Humans need sunshine to make Vitamin D to make bones.

If you're pregnant, white and you cloak your skin with sun-block in New Zealand, you may end up giving your baby rickets - an age-old disease which leads to weak and easily fractured bones. And those symptoms are seen as a serious danger sign for possible child abuse.

Equally, if you're pregnant, Thai and live in dark-for-half-the-year Sweden, you are in danger of not getting enough sun - and that also means your babies could end up with rickets.

The problem is that rickets and child abuse share some of the same symptoms - so which is it?

That's not an academic question for Erik Eriksson from Sweden, who faces four years in prison because he has been held to have violently shaken his 16-day-old daughter, Linnea.

His Thai partner, Nancy, stands by him. There is no other evidence that he is a child abuser.

Lock him up and throw away the key - you might be tempted to say.

Erik is in dire trouble because his daughter had multiple fractures and bleeds over the brain. And, many experts say, they must have been caused by someone. But that is not a fact.

It's a deduction based on a controversial theory called Shaken Baby Syndrome - see my previous blogs on the Keran Henderson case. Keran is serving a sentence for manslaughter but she denies shaking the child in her care.

And many people who know her believe her.

In Erik's case, there is another explanation for his daughter's condition, one for which there is evidence, in New Zealand, the United States and many other countries, and that places a big question mark against the 'certainty' of Erik's guilt.

The other theory argues that Linnea's fractures were caused by congenital rickets because her mother, Nancy, is originally from Thailand and the combination of the dark pigmentation of her skin and the weak sunshine in the far north of Europe caused Vitamin D deficiency and that caused weak bone growth in the womb and that caused Linnea's fractures.

But what about the bleeds over the brain? Well, there is evidence that they can happen naturally in child birth and it is very hard to date them precisely. So, not abuse, necessarily..

Dr Kathy Keller and Professor Patrick Barnes at Stanford University have written a paper - 'Rickets vs. abuse: a national and international epidemic' - that sets out the evidence that Vitamin D deficiency is getting worse in the United States and it gets worse in winter.

Black, white and everybody in between are suffering from more cases - while the Vitamin D in food and milk is lower than it has been for a generation.

From this study, it looks like lack of sunshine in northern climes and worries about skin cancer, particularly in white people, have caused a new and silent problem: childhood rickets.

In New Zealand, Annie Judkins and Carl Eagleton, got worried when they found ten cases of childhood rickets in three years in one GP's practice in Wellington.

They tested 90 pregnant mums for rickets and found that almost nine out of 10 were Vitamin D deficient - and some two thirds had a serious deficiency.

The mums were from a wide spectrum: African, Maori, European, Middle Eastern, and Polynesian.

Shaken Baby Syndrome has powerful defenders in the child protection community, who argue that it is valid science and that perpetrators have confessed to it.

However, it is also the case that no-one independent has ever witnessed a shaking leading to the symptoms - bleeds over the surface of the brain and in the eyes and brain damage - alleged to be found in the syndrome and no-one has ever filmed it.

Erik faces the legal hurdle that his defence relies on new science - rickets plus child birth - and judges like old precedents - SBS.

This is a problem that one of his defence experts, Dr Waney Squier, is familiar with.

The Oxford neuro-pathologist helped clear Suzanne Holdsworth of the false finding of child murder of Kyle Fisher - see my previous blog. (The Independent Police Complaints Commission are now investigating the integrity of the first Cleveland Police investigation into Holdsworth's conviction.)

Dr Squier, a sceptic on Shaken Baby Syndrome, argues that Baby Linnea had just been born - and that if you combine congenital rickets with a difficult birth, then bleeds in the eye and over the surface of the brain are natural events, not child abuse.

The Swedish judges have thus far dismissed the evidence from around the world that suggests that Erik might never have harmed his little girl at all. The matter now goes to final appeal.

The problem is that if Eric is innocent but goes to prison because of questionable science, then it is likely that many more children in Sweden and elsewhere, including Britain, will suffer from rickets - a wholly preventable disease - while the food and milk manufacturers are under no pressure to boost the level of Vitamin D.

You would have missed - not noticed - on a bus.

She was very quiet, dark-haired, willowy, with an academic air. You could imagine her being an Anglo-Saxon scholar, perhaps, spending her days bent over old parchments about Beowulf and the like. And about that, you would be dead wrong. She was probably the bravest woman I have ever met.

Brave, because she was following in the footsteps of , shot dead in the lift in her Moscow apartment in 2006 on the birthday of the then-President, now Prime Minister, of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

Brave, because Natalia - half-Russian, half-Chechen - used to be Anna's translator in and after Anna had been killed she knew exactly the risks she was running.

Brave, because Natalia lived in Chechnya, and the local boss there is , who critics say is a psychotic warlord. They say he feeds the tigers at his very own private zoo with members of the opposition, that he tortures and rapes and kills at will, with impunity.

Mr Kadyrov, who I'd love to meet one day, denies all that but has been reported to have said: "I've already killed who I should have killed. And I will kill all of those standing behind them, as long as I myself am not killed or jailed. I will be killing as long as I live," which is very nicely put. If only he were my MP.

Mr Kadyrov has specifically denied allegations from the Russian human rights organisation and others that he was personally responsible for Natalia's murder, saying, "I don't kill women".

Natalia had been working for Memorial, on cataloguing allegations of killing, torture and abuse in Chechnya, many blamed on the Kaydrovites, an armed gang led by you-know-who.

Memorial said that at 8.30 in the morning she was forcefully taken from her home in Chechnya into a car. She was heard to shout out to passers-by that she was being kidnapped. Her body was found in woodland near Nazran, the main city in neighbouring Ingushetia, about nine hours later. She had bullet wounds to the head and chest.

Why move the body from one autonomous region to the next one along? When I last went to Chechnya in 2000, not entirely with the local authorities' permission, there were seven checkpoints between Ingushetia and Chechnya.

With killings and terror still high, I would be astonished if there were not several armed military police checkpoints on that road today.

It was as if whoever killed Natalia was making the simple point that the killers had nothing to do with Chechnya because the body was dumped in Ingushetia, forgetting the slightly more complicated point that whoever did the killing has the power to cross that border at will with a either a corpse or a kidnap victim in the boot.

I met Natalia once in 2007, when I was chairing the very first Anna Politkovskaya Award for the campaign at the Frontline Club in London. She was graceful, honoured by the award and somehow - and I struggle to find the right words - shy, abashed at all the fuss that put her at the centre of all this attention.

She was also absolutely firm that she must be exact, accurate in how she did her job. I sensed that what saved her from being overcome, paralysed by fear was her concentration on detail: what time did the men come, what did they look like, precisely, what did he/she hear, see, smell.

The more accurate her cataloguing of hopelessness, the more difficult it would be to deny the detail of the allegations. It was probably that accuracy, that insistence on getting it right that made her such an enemy of whomsoever wanted her out of the way.

Documenting human rights abuses sounds like a very boring and worthy thing to do. But what it actually means is sitting down with someone whose heart is bursting with fear to talk about a loved one.

And the witness can be desperately conflicted. By telling the story the witness may end up dead him or herself. By telling the story he or she may worsen the lot of the loved one - who may be tortured more, or even killed.

So the witness has to put an awful lot of trust into the documenter - and that was Natalia's great strength, and that great strength is the thing that got her killed.

"There is no shred of doubt that she was targeted due to her professional activity," said Tanya Lokshina, of in Moscow. boss, Irene Khan, described Natalia as 'a courageous and inspiring woman,' adding: 'Human rights violations in Russia, and especially in the North Caucasus, can no longer be ignored. And those who stand up for human rights need protection.'

Mariana Katzarova, of , put it more simply in an email to me: "They killed Natalia Estemirova today...it is sickening. We lost our Natalia.'

May she rest in peace.