ETIOLOGY OF BERIBERI. 289 



in which an infectious agrent as the cause of the disease has been 

 excluded in any way as near as rigid a manner as in those of 

 Fraser and Stanton have been performed. However, the con- 

 tributions of Ellis, "^ Hipfhet,"' Chamberlain,'"'- and particularly 

 of Heiser'"'" are all very valuable from an epidemiological stand- 

 point and lend considerable additional support to the view that 

 beriberi is caused by the prolonged use of polished rice as a 

 staple article of diet. 



Castellani,""* in considering the experiments of Fraser and 

 Stanton states: 



The isolated position in which the gangs were working almost excluded 

 any possibility of infection from place or from persons, but not quite from 

 the latter. 



As Fraser and Stanton both point out in their later publica- 

 tion,"*' the whole Malay Peninsula has long been known as an 

 endemic focus of beriberi, and the mortality rates from this 

 disease have been enormous there for several decades, 



Wright"^ also remarks there is no better place than the Malay 

 Peninsula in which to investigate this disease. 



Fraser and Stanton in their article also write: 



At this time, evidence of a communication between the consumption of 

 white rice and beri-beri was by no means convincing either to the great body 

 of medical and scientific workers or to ourselves, 



and at the conclusion of their article, detailing their experiments 

 on human beings, they state that their experiments appear to 

 justify further research along these lines. 



At the meeting of the Far Eastern Association of Tropical 

 Medicine in 1910 a resolution was passed calling the attention 

 of the various governments concerned to the fact that sufficient 

 evidence has now been produced in support of the view that beri- 

 beri is associated with the continuous consumption of white 

 (polished) rice as a staple article of diet. There was consider- 

 able opposition to the passage of this resolution in this form on 

 the ground that it was not sufficiently conservative from a scien- 



" Loc. cit. 



" This Journal, Sec. B (1910), 5, 73. 



" This Journal, Sec. B (1911), 6, 133. 



"This Journal, Sec. B (1911), 6, 229; Annual Rep. P. I. Bur. Hlth. 

 (1910); Journ. Am. Med. Assoc. (1911), 56, 1237. 



"^Castellani and Chalmers, Manual of Tropical Medicine (1910), 890. 



" Studies from Institute for Medical Research. Federated Malay States 

 (1911), No. 12, 1. 



'* Loc. cit. 



