Word: sprue
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Obesity: A Malnutrition. Throughout much of the world, food is still so scarce that half of the earth's population has trouble getting the 1,600 calories a day necessary to sustain life. The deficiency diseases-scurvy, tropical sprue, pellagra -run rampant. In West Africa, for example, where meat is a luxury and babies must be weaned early to make room at the breast for later arrivals, a childhood menace is kwashiorkor, or "red Johnny," a growth-stunting protein deficiency (signs: reddish hair, bloated belly) that kills more than half its victims, leaves the rest prey for parasites...
Magic Through Vitamins. Dr. Spies did much to prove the effectiveness of folic acid, another vitamin, in treating several forms of anemia, including early cases of pernicious anemia. Next, at the University of Havana's Calixto Garcia Hospital, he gave folic acid to victims of tropical sprue, a wasting, debilitating deficiency disease of which anemia is one symptom. Again, patients got better as though by magic. The burden of Spies's current work in Havana and San Juan: to defeat tropical sprue by prevention...
...Spies (rhymes with fees) deeper and deeper into the dim regions of deficiency diseases. It has also led him to major medical discoveries. Last week in Science he announced a new one with a report that folic acid, part of the vitamin B complex, was a remedy for tropical sprue, a widespread disease in such teeming, undernourished lands as Puerto Rico...
Spies, with associates at San Juan's School of Tropical Medicine, thinks that the efficacy of folic acid also proves decisively that sprue (symptoms: diarrhea, mouth sores, lassitude) is a result of poor diet rather than a contagious disease, as some doctors have insisted. Folic acid, Spies announced earlier this year in the A.M.A. Journal, is also a remedy for all but a few rare kinds of anemia, causing red blood cells to pour into the blood in striking numbers...
...Sprue, a wasting sickness (cause unknown) that chiefly attacks white people in towns & cities. It produces constipation, melancholy, low blood pressure, muscle cramps, diminution in the size of the liver. Constantly increasing in the temperate zones of Latin America, sprue seems to be related to vitamin deficiency, can be checked by an increase of fruits and vegetables in the diet...