One day in April 2014, Mathilde Tissier noticed her hamsters were acting a little odd. The Cricetus cricetus in her lab at the University of Strasbourg in France, once happily subsisting on a corn-based diet, were now banging their feeder against the cage, their tongues swollen and black, and had begun to eat their pups alive. As Tissier reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in January 2017, she suddenly had cannibal hamsters on her hands.
“I was shocked,” says Tissier, a conservation biologist. “I thought I did something wrong.” Searching for an explanation, Tissier teased out a thread that wove through America’s past. Some of the symptoms she saw in both the mothers and surviving pups resembled those of a debilitating disease called pellagra. The illness affected more than 3 million people and killed more than 100,000 in the United States, primarily in the South, between 1900 and 1940.
The quest to understand and cure the outbreak combined research, social politics and economic forces — and, as Tissier saw firsthand, it’s a history we’d do well to remember.
