134 The Philippine Journal of Science ™™ 



very high results were obtained, undoubtedly due to extreme 

 acidosis. 



The excretion of ammonia is regarded as the mechanism 

 whereby the body rids itself of acids formed during metabolism. 

 Some unpublished experiments conducted on urines from 

 osteomalacia cases from Shensi Province show that the subjects 

 had experienced extreme acidosis, causing the bases to be 

 washed out of the system to such an extent that the urine 

 eventually contained very little calcium and the whole struc- 

 ture of the frame was upset. The disease is called locally the 

 acid disease, and is recognized by the lay mind as being related 

 in some way to a disturbance of the acid base equilibrium of 

 the body. Were this disease a rarity it would not call for 

 mention here ; but when vital statistics show that 20 per cent 

 of the women of that province die either in or subsequent to 

 childbirth, one is led to attribute the cause to some general 

 factor like an acid-ash diet, injurious to both sexes but more 

 conspicuous in the female. During the long barren winters of 

 northern China the country people subsist on a very limited 

 diet composed almost entirely of cereals. Cereals in general 

 produce an acid ash and may well account for the high ammonia 

 excretion of the Asiatic. 



McCay(9) in his studies on Bengali prisoners found very high 

 values; namely, an average of 9.61 per cent of the total ni- 

 trogen. In several individual cases, not reported here, very 

 abnormal results were obtained— nearly as high as 20 per cent 

 Every care was taken to see that no errors were introduced. 

 The urines were preserved, and methods of estimation carried out 

 with normal foreign urines. The results with students' urines, 

 while not quite so high as those for the Bengali prisoners, exceed 

 those for the Chinese students in Singapore. The more-recent 

 work of Campbell (5) on ammonia excretion leaves no room for 

 doubt that the Asiatic has a high ammonia output. His ideas 

 concerning its possible relationship to excessive sweating or to 

 febrile disease are not supported by conditions in Peking; 

 rather, the high output has been considered to originate from 

 the diet, though one often finds intestinal parasites and intes- 

 tinal disorders that cause putrefaction with a high degree of 

 acidity. Facts concerning such possible causes have yet to be 

 established. If such causes do exist one would look for high 

 values for ethereal sulphates; however, our results show a 

 normal percentage. 



