The BBC recently ran an interesting look at a Wellcome Trust project that managed to reduce malaria rates in refugee camps on the Burmese/Thailand border by as much as 90 percent — all by using a Chinese herb.

NIck White, who runs the Wellcome Trust’s south-east Asia unit, told the BBC that he and other doctors learned of a drug being used to treat malaria in China. Called quinghaosu or artemsinin, doctors used the drug in combination with another anti-malarial drug, mesloquine. The combination treatment was 95 percent effective according to White. Moreover, because those who were treated were less likely to pass spread the disease, the total number of malaria cases in the refugee camps declined by about 90 percent. All this in an area where drug-resistant malaria was becoming common.

If such results can be reproduced in ongoing trials by the World Health Organization, White will certainly be current that these two drugs are “the most important anti-malarial drugs to be discovered in the last 50 years.”

The only possible drawback is that the drugs, coming from herbs, might be difficult to produce in very large quantities. The BBC reports that synthesizing the drugs would be “very difficult,” but White notes that the herbs could be grown in a number of other countries, including possibly southern Europe.

Source:

Herb offers malaria treatment hope. The BBC, June 1, 2001.

The Herbal Remedy Seems to Conquer Malaria by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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