Murals (2008) by PHANTAST - Graffiti - Cultural Music & Art Association inc. - 98 Milne St. Benleigh
NUTRITIONAL DISORDERS: SCURVY AND PELLAGRA.
"At the gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores".(Luke 16,21)
SCURVY is due to lack of vitamin C and the patient may have listlessness, cachexia, gingivitis, loose teeth, bleeding from gums, nose, hair follicles, or into joints, bladder, gut; muscle pain/ weakness, oedema.
PELLAGRA is due to lack of nicotinic acid and has a classical triad: diarrhoea, dementia and dermatitis (Casal's necklace) together with neuropathy, depression, insomnia, rigidity, tremor, ataxia, fits.
THE PELLAGRA PARADOX. "Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. The work of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price... The children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - died of malnutrition - because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath". ( J. Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, cap 25).