Kwashiorkor.

Kwashiorkor kills millions of young children in the tropical Third World. It was believed to be a disease of protein starvation. The medical team headed by Professor Ralph Henrickse of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine has discovered that aflatoxin, a fungus toxin, may be the triggering factor in this disease which also impairs liver function. In New Zealand, we have a pasture fungus, the spores of which produce a liver toxin that has killed millions of animals this century and impaired the performance of millions more. New Zealand is a pastoral farming country with 70 million sheep and several million cattle. We now protect the animal with zinc medication. This paper describes the similarities between Kwashiorkor and the mycotoxic liver disease in New Zealand livestock, known locally as Facial Eczema. It describes briefly my discovery that pharmacological doses of zinc protected farm animals from pasture contaminated with the spores of the fungus Pithomyces chartarum, which contains the toxin sporidesmin. This paper proposes that Kwashiorkor and Facial Eczema are diseases with similar beginnings and a common end.