Word: pellagra
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...public policy of covering up the problem of hunger" in order to attract new industry to South Carolina. Hollings told the committee of the misery he had encountered there on a recent ten-day tour of impoverished counties. "There is hunger in South Carolina," said Hollings. "There is pellagra, a disease supposedly nonexistent in this country. [There are] rickets and scurvy." He was especially shaken by the high incidence of parasitic worms among the rural, poor, who often live without even the most primitive forms of sanitation...
Mental Malnutrition. The importance of many vitamins to human health, although commercially overexploited, is well documented. What has been too often overlooked, Pauling complains, is that most of the vitamin-deficiency diseases, such as scurvy, pellagra and pernicious anemia, give early warning of their onset. Months or even years before the physical signs appear, there are changes in mental processes. To Pauling, this suggests simply that the brain is more sensitive than most other organs to even a mild deficiency. He would broaden the range of "essential nutrilites" to include vitamins, amino acids and fatty acids, and probably a host...
...Science, he suggests that because of genetic as well as environmental differences, some people may need more of certain vitamins or other essential nutrients than others. If they have a deficiency, it may selectively affect the brain, producing what he calls a sort of "cerebral scurvy" or "cerebral pellagra...
Preventing Disease. From this discovery, Funk correctly theorized that chemical substances which he named vitamines (from the Latin vita for life and amine for chemical compounds containing nitrogen) were capable of preventing deficiency diseases such as scurvy, pellagra and rickets, and indeed were essential to the sustenance of healthy life. The assumption that all vitamins contain nitrogen later proved wrong, and the e was dropped...
Benefit & Bane. Even more dramatic are the contributions fungi have made to science and medicine. Yeasts' high content of vitamins makes them effective against beriberi and pellagra. Ergot, derived from fungus-infected grain, speeds labor in childbirth, helps control bleeding. A common red bread mold has vastly facilitated research on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which governs heredity and holds the secret of life...