The relationship of dermatitis in chicks to lack of vitamin B2 and to dietary egg-white

PELLAGRA-LIKE symptoms in the rat have been observed to result from well- supplemented rations containing coagulated Chinese dried egg-white [Boas, 1924, 1] or from raw or slightly cooked fresh whole egg [Friedberger, 1926]. Scheunert and Wagner [1927], Stenqvist [1928] and others2 found that whole eggs cooked sufficiently, i.e. at 1000 for from 3 to 30 minutes, lost the capacity to produce the characteristic symptoms in rats when fed as the sole diet. Parsons [1932] and Parsons and Kelly [1933] showed that Chinese fermented dried egg-white requires a distinctly longer interval of moist heat treatment than does fresh egg-white in order to lose its harmful properties (18 times as long at 800), thus explaining the observation of Boas [1924, 2], that whereas well-supplemented rations containing mildly heated egg-white produce pellagralike symptoms when Chinese fermented egg-white is used, they do not if this is replaced by fresh egg-white.