Studies on the Vitamin Requirements of Poultry

BEFORE 1959, little informtion was available on the vitamin requirements of chicks reared in Japan. Therefore, the recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council, U.S.A. (1954) had been used as a guide in the practical formulation of poultry feed. Yoshida et al. (1959) reported that the White Leghorn chicks in Japan required more of some B-vitamins than the NASNRC recommended levels and subsequently experiments on the vitamin requirements of White Leghorn chicks were carried out at this Laboratory (Yoshida and Morimoto, 1960, 1961; Yoshida et al., 1962a, b). When the geneticists of this Institute introduced White Plymouth Rock chicks of U.S. origin in 1960, some of the imported chicks suffered leg weakness. The birds were fed the stock diet of the Institute, fortified with B-vitamins according to the data obtained in the experiments mentioned above with White Leghorn chicks. Curled-toe paralysis and perosis were observed among the …