The non-profit independent Vitamin D Council, in a newsletter this week, printed a letter from a woman who lost custody of her infant daughter after broken bones were initially suspected by authorities to be child-abuse related.

It turns out the baby was severely vitamin D deficient — a condition most likely caused by the mother’s vitamin D deficiency, which also had not been detected.

The letter tells a horrifying story — one that may be more and more common as a new generation of sun-avoiding vitamin D deficient mothers are unknowingly giving birth to vitamin D deficient babies.

“For almost 50 years, parents like you have either been sent to jail or had their child taken away or both; we are talking about hundreds of thousands of parents,” Vitamin D Council founder Dr. John Cannell writes in a commentary on the letter. “It is all based on a simple observation loaded with face validity: children with lots of broken bones must have been beaten by someone. Now, it is quite possible that most of those hundreds of thousands of infants were never beaten, never abused, never mistreated, they were misdiagnosed, they simply had infantile rickets.”

To read the incredible letter and Dr. Cannel’s response click here.