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The Collaborative International Dictionary
beriberi

Barbiers \Bar"biers\, n. (Med.) A variety of paralysis, peculiar to India and the Malabar coast; -- considered by many to be the same as beriberi in a chronic form.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
beriberi

also beri-beri, paralytic disease prevalent in much of India, 1703, literally "great weakness," intensifying reduplication of Sinhalese beri "weakness."

Wiktionary
beriberi

n. (context pathology English) An ailment caused by a deficiency of thiamine (vitamin B1), leading to lethargy and organ complications.

WordNet
beriberi

n. avitaminosis caused by lack of thiamine (vitamin B1)

Wikipedia
Beriberi

Beriberi refers to a cluster of symptoms caused primarily by thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. Beriberi has conventionally been divided into three separate entities, relating to the body system mainly involved (peripheral nervous system or cardiovascular) or age of person (like infantile). Beriberi is one of several thiamine-deficiency related conditions, which may occur concurrently, including Wernicke's encephalopathy (mainly affecting the central nervous system), Korsakoff's syndrome (amnesia with additional psychiatric manifestations), and Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (with both neurologic and psychiatric symptoms).

Historically, beriberi has been common in regions where what is variously referred to as polished or white rice forms a major part of the diet, which has its husk removed to extend its shelf life and palatability but has the side effect of removing the primary source of thiamine. It was not known until the end of the 19th century that polishing rice was associated with beriberi.

Usage examples of "beriberi".

Some of the men with wet beriberi would lose a little fluid from their limbs, and from their lungs.

Peterson trudged out of the tunnel with as much spring in his step as a starving man with beriberi could have.

The disease produced damage to the nerves, with the result that a person with beriberi felt weakness in his limbs and great lassitude.

Beriberi, like scurvy, was stopped on shipboard, but, again like scurvy, Beriberi continued to flourish on land.

He had finally recovered and, in 1884, he agreed to return to Indonesia at the head of a team of physicians in order to study beriberi and to determine how best to deal with it.

Eijkman that it was quite analogous to the human disease of beriberi, which was also, after all, a polyneuritis.

McCollum could show, on the other hand, that whatever it was in rice hulls that prevented beriberi could be extracted with water and was therefore water-soluble.

Infantile mortality--due chiefly to beriberi, which meant malnutrition, and to tetanus, which meant dirty handling at birth, reached 773.

Research has proved that the diet of the masses--mainly polished rice--is entirely inadequate to human needs, and that beriberi, a fatal sickness due to insufficient nourishment, is steadily increasing in the Islands.

In the mean time he asked me all sorts of questions about myself and all my relatives, whether we had been subject to this and that malady, until I felt as if we must some of us have had more or less of them, and could not feel quite sure whether Elephantiasis and Beriberi and Progressive Locomotor Ataxy did not run in the family.

Soon she contracted beriberi, and by autumn her condition was serious.

Full of ambition and the milk of kindness, he came out to the islands to study beriberi for some medical foundation, and stayed on to work with the natives.

Their absence is probably responsible for certain diseases, such as beriberi, scurvy, and possibly pellagra, as well as much ill health of a less definite sort.

Lyme Regis or that his dog has beriberi or any of that Holmesian nonsense.

There were alcohol, lead, arsenic, bisulphide of carbon, diseases such as diabetes, diphtheria, typhoid, and finally, much to my excitement, was enumerated beriberi, with the added information, "or, as the Japanese call it, kakke.