Poor People's Vitamin

When the American Chemical Society meets at Atlanta April 7, Vitamin G will be given prime position on the program. Most interested will be the poor of the South who suffer from pellagra, the disease which Vitamin G is famed for fighting. for preventing.*

Since 1906 pellagra has been a horror to the South. In the springtime it strikes people whose winter diet has been confined too closely to corn and pork. The first symptoms: dizziness, headaches, diarrhoea, painful skin rash.

In the fall these symptoms disappear only to come back the following spring with increased intensity. As the disease progresses the sick one becomes dried and parched like a mummy, with bones protruding at macabre angles. Muscles waste, body motions become slow and languid.

Disorganization of the nervous system is followed by imbecility, death. Between 30% and 40% of clinic and hospital cases died in the first years after pellagra's invasion of the South was noted.

The late Dr. Joseph Goldberger of the U. S. Public Health Service, after working in the South, flouted medical men who had thought for 200 years that pellagra was infectious, by announcing that it was a result of a poorly balanced diet. To prove his point he had himself, his wife and 14 assistants inoculated with the blood of an infected woman. They suffered no ill effects.

Next he asked for twelve volunteers in a Mississippi prison, who would undergo a test. The test was alluring. He was going to put them in a house apart and feed them for six months on biscuits, mush. rice, syrup, gravy, sugar, sweet potatoes. The prisoners were enthusiastic until, six months later, they developed pellagra. They were cured with milk and meat, then pardoned.

Deduced Dr. Goldberger: pellagra is caused by lack of lean meat, eggs, milk, which poor people cannot afford. All contain Vitamin G.

An opposing school of thought holds that pellagra is due to an infectious agent which is allowed to grow in the body, due to its rundown condition. Both sides arrive at the same conclusion: proper diet is a preventive and cure.

Research workers set themselves to the task of finding the relative Vitamin G content of various foods. The results of this work will be announced at Atlanta. One paper will deal with beef, will rank the value-parts as: liver, kidney, heart, muscle.

Surpassing lean meat in value is yeast, which was distributed by the Red Cross during the Mississippi flood of 1927 to prevent pellagra. Below lean meat come milk, eggs, wheat germ, tomato juice. Vegetables have little G value, fats and oils none.

*The original water-soluble Vitamin B was broken down into B, and 62. The former guards against and prevents beriberi, the latter pellagra. They are termed F and G.

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