ABSTRACT
Muscular dystrophy and other disorders associated with insufficient sele nium intake were found to be a problem in animal husbandry during the 1950s and 1960s. Since 1969, commercial animal feeds in Finland have been supple mented with 0.1 mg of sodium selenite per kilogram of product, dry weight. This reduced the incidence of selenium deficiency problems but did not entirely remove the need for selenium medication of domestic animals, and did not appreciably affect human nutrition. In a large study of the mineral composition of Finnish foods conducted in the late 1970s it was shown that all agricultural products grown and produced in Finland contained very low amounts of selenium (Varo and Koivistoinen, 1980).
