Chinese Shrub: Best Hope
January 2007
If it wasn't for the fresh, sharp scent, you could easily mistake Sweet Wormwood for any other kind of shrub. But this shrub, also called the Artemisia annua, is widely regarded by medical experts as the best cure for malaria, one of the world's leading killer diseases.
HOPE FOR CURE
There has been no let-up in the search for an efficacious anti-malaria drug with minimal side effects. The disease kills more than 1 million people each year, or one person every 30 seconds, and makes 300-500 million ill. Ninety percent of the deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.
The WHO describes malaria and HIV/AIDS as two of the most devastating health problems of our time, accounting for 4 million deaths a year. Africa, many parts of Asia and South America have long been hotbeds for the malaria parasite, but it's not just a problem for poorer nations. Even the most developed nations, which deploy troops in far-flung, often mosquito-infested territories, have also been searching for the best cure.
Compounding the urgency is the lack of a vaccine against the malaria parasite, which has grown resistant to well-known anti-malarials, such as chloroquine and pyrimethamine.
Quinine, extracted from the bark of the South American cinchona tree and in use for more than 160 years, was regarded as the drug of choice up to the early 2000s, until it was displaced by artemisinin in the controversial SEAQUAMAT (Southeast Asia Quinine Artesunate Malarial Trial) of June 2003-May 2005.
DEVELOPMENT
It was here in Luofushan in China's southern Guangdong province that the shrub with fern-like leaves first found its way into Chinese medical annals more than 1,600 years ago.
No one knows how the Chinese discovered the shrub's life-saving properties, but it was doctor Ge Hong (283-363 AD) who first wrote about it in his Book of Emergency Medicine when he served as a Taoist priest in this mountainous region.
"Taoist priests were obsessed with the idea of elixirs. Ge Hong never found any elixir, but he discovered many herbal drugs, and he was the first to record the properties of artemisinin," said Zhang Shaoping of Guangdong New South Group Co. Ltd., which produces artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs).
Artemisinin is the malaria-fighting compound extracted from the shrub and is used to treat the disease, which causes fever, vomiting, body aches, diarrhoea, anaemia, loss of concentration, delirium, convulsions, coma and eventually, death. Children and pregnant women deteriorate especially rapidly because of their weak immune systems, and the very young can die within 24 hours of the onset of symptoms if they are not treated.
In this largest ever real-life trial for severe malaria, doctors in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Myanmar split 2,000 patients suffering from severe malaria into two groups, giving half of them artemisinin and the other half quinine. Speaking about the trial at an anti-malaria conference in China's southern Guangzhou city recently (week beginning Jan 15), Arjen Dondorp, of the Mahidol University in Thailand, said: "We had to stop the trial because of the huge difference in mortality in the two groups." Artemisinin is the treatment of choice for severe malaria," he said.
The World Health Organisation recommends that artemisinin be used in combination with other drugs, or artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), to slow the development of any resistance.*
Information taken from article:
Tan Ee Lyn | 25 Jan 2007
Reuters Foundation Alert Net
References
http://www.fightingmalaria.org/news.aspx?id=308
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/B910808.htm
* This is a deception! All evidence is to the contrary. Greed motives politicians as well as medical officials and professionals to promote patent medicines.
LIGHTHOUSE MISSIONS
Medical Conference - Nairobi, Kenya
June 2006
