Beriberi, it should be noted, is an extremely hard disease to contract. To get it as an adult, you have to eat a profoundly restricted diet, such as milled rice and virtually nothing else, for months. But Filipinos, separated from their farms and able to purchase only the cheapest food, suffered from it in large numbers, probably in the tens of thousands. It struck babies the hardest. Although infantile beriberi was unknown to doctors at the time (thus unrecorded as a diagnosis), it is doubtless the reason why Manila during the war had the world’s highest recorded infant mortality rate.
