Word: beriberi
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...Robert Runnels Williams, the victory marks a climax in a 40-year war against beriberi which he began, as it happened, in the Philippines. At 24, an unknown research chemist in Manila's Bureau of Science, Williams noted that chronic beriberi was dramatically cured by an extract made from rice bran. That was in 1910. It gave Williams the germ of an idea which flowered, 25 years later, in his isolating vitamin BI and then synthesizing it cheaply...
Spoiled Rice. Beriberi in the rice bowl proved to be one of the simplest diseases to prevent and cure. It is caused by a vitamin (mainly BI) deficiency and can be stopped by putting enough BI in the diet.-There is plenty of BI in the outer coating of the rice grain and its seed germ, but both are removed as bran in the milling. Nearly all of the world's billion rice-eaters mill and polish their grain. They eat vitamin-poor white rice, and feed the vitamin-rich bran to their chickens...
American forces have won the second battle of Bataan. This time the enemy was beriberi, ancient scourge of the Orient's rice-eating people, which kills hundreds of thousands every year and cripples millions more. Bataan used to be one of the worst plague spots. Reports Dr. Robert R. Williams after an inspection of test areas on the peninsula: in the year ended April I there was not a single death that could be laid to beriberi...
...faced slow death by hunger and disease. Cabled TIME Correspondent Frederick Gruin after a look at the city: "You see the marks of the struggle in the taut, unsmiling faces on the streets. You see it in the meagerly equipped hospitals where acute tuberculosis has doubled. Rickets, twilight blindness, beriberi and other vitamin-deficiency diseases have become common...
Proudery and arrogance dissolved rapidly on Berhala. The prisoners shared the floor with swarms of vicious rats. The diet consisted of rice sweepings, a tough, rubbery green vegetable and tea. For latrines there were two tin buckets. Filth and vitamin deficiency brought on dysentery, influenza, beriberi and several other diseases, mostly untreated. When the guards weren't slapping faces in anger, they were patting bottoms lewdly. Yet some of those same guards would unexpectedly share their food with the children, permit wives to see husbands in defiance of rules, even assist in smuggling provisions and medicines from friendly Asiatics...