This week I am in South Carolina, meeting with various organizations about our Protect our Children NOW! project at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). Even more exciting is that today, March 23rd, doctors and researchers from MUSC are putting on a free conference for the medical community about how vitamin D sufficiency, specifically getting above 40 ng/ml (100 nmol/L), affects many aspects of pregnancy ( view agenda) culminating with a presentation of what happened at MUSC and how to replicate it in their hospitals. We will have a summary in next week's news, but you can imagine the excitement today as doctors talk to doctors about how effective this new standard of care is at MUSC.

I can feel the wave building, and soon many more organizations will recognize the impact and take the leap to change their standard of care - to treat mothers and in turn their babies... to give a better start to these children's lives... to protect our future children.

After this conference at MUSC I am flying on to Florida to participate in this year's Vitamin D Workshop. You can read more about the conference below, but it is one of the preeminent conferences for vitamin D research. I remember my first vitamin D conference, in Brugge, Belgium in 2009. It was there that I met many of the research members of our panel for the first time.

We will have a poster presentation on the findings of our Protect our Children NOW! project at MUSC during the Vitamin D Workshop. Our take home message for all attendees is that raising vitamin D levels above 40 ng/ml provides substantial reduction in preterm birth for a large, diverse population.

Carole Baggerly