During the early years of the present decade, perhaps even in the still turbulent days of 1948, there could be seen on the highways of the Chinese province of Yunnan numbers of cretins, as well as other persons little more fortunate, displaying prominent goiters. Men and women working on the Burma Road were showing an incidence of thyroid enlargement often as high as 80 per cent.1 Residence in the Yunnan district for as little as six months, it appears, would suffice to induce such deformity in susceptible persons.
For an understanding of this striking phenomenon, in many respects similar to the once epidemic proportion of goiter and cretinism in Berne, Switzerland, it is necessary only to remember that the Japanese were, in the early 1940's, still in control of strategic areas of China. As a consequence, the hinterland of China was cut off from its former coastal supply of