Far from being obvious problems for the Hygienic Laboratory to undertake, noncontagious diseases often carried considerable political sensitivities. Pellagra, a scourge of poor southerners, was a prime example. In 1914, when Dr. Joseph Goldberger conducted an epidemiological study that revealed pellagra to be a dietary deficiency disease, he recognized that it occurred largely in sharecroppers who grew cotton up to their doorsteps and went without fresh vegetables, milk, and meat. His conclusion that economic reform was need to prevent pellagra angered politicians who were invested in the status quo. Goldberger died before he identified the missing vitamin as niacin, but he determined that brewer’s yeast was an abundant, cost-effective cure for pellagra.