Medicine: B, for Fits

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Crouching, howling, blind-running, wall-climbing are symptoms of running fits, or fright disease in dogs. Although fits, unlike rabies (a deadly virus disease), cannot be transmitted from dogs to human beings, the convulsions are so alarmingly violent that more than 100,000 innocent dogs with fits are destroyed every year. Last week in Veterinary Medicine, scholarly Dr. John W. Patton of East Lansing, Mich, published an illuminating report on the cause & cure of fits.

Several months ago, said Dr. Patton, a worried dog owner consulted him about the howling and staggering of his sturdy, thoroughbred dogs. Dr. Patton found that ten days before, the owner had taken his dogs off a special diet rich in vitamin B1 (found in whole cereals, meat, milk and eggs). He now fed them nothing but starchy dog food. When Dr. Patton gave the dogs meat and a well-balanced dog-food diet again, they made "a rapid and prompt recovery."

Since dogs deprived of vitamins C, D and G develop scurvy, rickets and pellagra just like human beings, Dr. Patton believed that he had discovered the canine equivalent of beriberi (vitamin B1 deficiency disease). To test his belief he took 13 healthy puppies from his own kennels, fed them nothing but water and heavy dog food mixed with all the vitamins but B1. Within a week the dogs shunned the food, lost weight. They avoided light, trembled and cringed when patted, climbed walls, fell backward, howled constantly. When offered food, they fell forward into their pans.

After these symptoms had developed, Dr. Patton gave each of the sick dogs a small injection of pure vitamin B1 "The effect," he reported, "was . . . spectacular. [The injection] transformed a racing, howling maniac, or one in appalling convulsions, frothing at the mouth and screeching piteously, into a quiet though nervous animal within four hours, and in 48 hours into a normal, healthy, playful puppy."

Canine beriberi, concluded Dr. Patton, first developed in the U. S. "during the years immediately following the War . . . when scraps suitable for dog food largely disappeared from the . . . dining-room table, and urban dog owners turned to commercial foods for the sustenance of their pets. ..." If owners do not feed their dogs meat, said Dr. Patton, to avoid fits they should make sure that the commercial food they use contains vitamin B1.