Micronutrient deficiencies — structured clinical encounter

A two-year-old boy presents with three months of pallor, tiredness and irritability. He drinks around eight hundred millilitres of cow's milk a day, eats little solid food, and has begun eating handfuls of garden soil. His weight has fallen from the fiftieth to the fifteenth centile, and a full blood count shows a haemoglobin of eighty-two grams per litre with a mean cell volume of sixty-two femtolitres. You are the paediatric registrar working through the recognition of iron-deficiency anaemia, the confirmatory workup, the management and dietary counselling, and the rationale for universal screening.