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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Those of you who are raising children may wish to read this article:

A Rise in Kidney Stones Is Seen in U.S. Children
Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times
YOUNG VICTIM Tessa Cesario, 11, developed a kidney stone in February.  
She has since cut back on salt and is drinking more water.

By LAURIE TARKAN
Published: October 27, 2008
To the great surprise of parents, kidney stones, once considered a  
disorder of middle age, are now showing up in children as young as 5  
or 6.

While there are no reliable data on the number of cases, pediatric  
urologists and nephrologists across the country say they are seeing a  
steep rise in young patients. Some hospitals have opened pediatric  
kidney stone clinics.

“The older doctors would say in the ’70s and ’80s, they’d see a kid  
with a stone once every few months,” said Dr. Caleb P. Nelson, a  
urology instructor at Harvard Medical School who is co-director of the  
new kidney stone center at Children’s Hospital Boston. “Now we see  
kids once a week or less.”

Dr. John C. Pope IV, an associate professor of urologic surgery and  
pediatrics at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt  
in Nashville, said, “When we tell parents, most say they’ve never  
heard of a kid with a kidney stone and think something is terribly  
wrong with their child.”

In China recently, many children who drank milk tainted with melamine  
— a toxic chemical illegally added to watered-down milk to inflate the  
protein count — developed kidney stones.

The increase in the United States is attributed to a host of factors,  
including a food additive that is both legal and ubiquitous: salt.

The rest of the article is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/health/28kidn.html?em