Vitamin B shortage kills wildlife
■ Experts see widespread shortage of thiamine in environment
Stockholm, Jan. 19: Researchers are puzzled by widespread shortage of vitamin B they believe is killing wildlife.
Thiamine (vitamin B1) is required for critical metabolic processes, such as energy production and functioning of the nervous system. This micronutrient is produced mainly by plants. People and animals must acquire it through their food.
Lennart Balk, an environmental biochemist at Stockholm University, saw that many birds couldn’t fly when he visited Swedish coastal colonies during a five-year period from 2004. Others were paralysed. Birds weren’t eating and had difficulty breathing. Thousands of birds were suffering and dying from this paralytic
disease, said Balk.
Scenes such as the one in Sweden, were seen again and again in recent years in a variety of species in Europe and North America. This had Balk and other researchers worried that something in the environment is causing
widespread thiamine shortages, which could explain these specific episodes.
Researchers generally agree that the crises in seabirds, fish, and other marine species have thiamine deficiencies in common. But much remains unknown. Is a thiamine shortage the root cause of the problem in every case? What might be driving such a widespread environmental vitamin deficiency? As instances of sick and dying wildlife continue to arise, though, a sense of urgency is building among researchers trying to figure out what’s going on.
In the late 1990s, Balk saw that several fish species in the Baltic Sea, including Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar), had trouble reproducing. Many of the larvae couldn’t swim straight and were lethargic before dying. When he supplemented the larvae with thiamine, almost all survived. In contrast, almost all of the larvae not treated with thiamine supplements died.
In the 1880s, Christiaan Eijkman, a doctor working in the Dutch East Indies, observed paralysis in chickens. They were experiencing weakness in their legs.
Eijkman linked the paralysis to the chickens’ diet of predominately cooked white rice, which he believed must be toxic; but his colleague, Gerrit Grijns, later came to suspect the rice was stripped of some vital substance in the milling processes. In some parts of Asia where people’s diets also relied largely on white rice, beriberi affected nearly 30% of the population. Eijkman shared a Nobel Prize in 1929 for his observations that aided the discovery of thiamine—the first vitamin to be identified.