The quest of vitamin B1

✍ Scribed by R.R. Williams

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1937
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 596 KB
• Volume: 224
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0016-0032
• DOI: 10.1016/s0016-0032(37)90794-4

✦ Synopsis

In I929 Professor Eijkmann of Utrecht was honored with the Nobel Prize in recognition of a discovery which he made more than thirty years previously. It was he who first developed polyneuritis in fowls and recognized it as identical with human beriberi, which was then, as now, one of the great scourges of the East. To Eijkmann in Java went the honor of making the discovery. The task of convincing the practitioner of tropical medicine fell to Fraser and Stanton in the Malay States and to Chamberlain and Vedder in the Philippines some fifteen years later. Since their day we have known as a practical matter that beriberi can be prevented by leaving some of the bran on rice, which is to be used for human consumption. The immediate public health problem has long been one of popular education with respect to the need for public control, for example, by a substantial tax on polished rice so as to restrict its consumption by the masses. So slow is this process that, after twenty years of adequate knowledge, scarcely any impression has been made on the incidence of beriberi in the Orient except to a limited extent in the Dutch East Indies. The task for the publicist still remains.