Malnutrition in Underdeveloped Countries

Abstract

VARIATION with time, place and person is an inherent characteristic of disease. nutritional disease illustrates this particularly well. With few exceptions the patterns of malnutrition in underdeveloped countries today were those of the developed countries thirty to fifty years ago. Pellagra, ariboflavinosis and beriberi were still commonly seen in the southern United States in the 1930's, scurvy, rickets and endemic goiter in the 1920's, and "Mehlnärshaden," or "starch dystrophy," a form of kwashiorkor, in Europe in the 1900's. Furthermore, as in the underdeveloped areas today, diarrheal disease and the common communicable diseases of childhood had a higher fatality because of . . .