![]() Jarrow’s narrative is as intricately constructed and perfectly paced as a best-selling novel. Jarrow lays out an articulate, accessible history of pellagra’s onset in the South in the early 1900s, early theories of its causes and remedies and the long road of research and experimentation that affected a definitive cure. It begins with red, scaly rashes on hands, feet and face, and after months of mouth sores, weight loss, diarrhea and lethargy, if it is not treated, it results in insanity followed by death. The book, “Red Madness: How a Medical Mystery Changed What We Eat,” has that title because of how the disease - most often caused by a chronic lack of niacin, or vitamin B3 - manifests itself. ![]() That disease, pellagra, is the subject of Gail Jarrow’s new nonfiction book for youth. ![]() In the United States of today it is astonishing - nearly incomprehensible - to realize that 100 years ago a nutrition-based disease was one of the leading causes of death in the American South. ![]()
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