Take This Tea and Call Me in the Morning [Slide Show]
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PEDIATRIC WARD at the Mbarara Regional Hospital in Uganda is filled with children suffering from malaria. Credit: Brendan Borrell
THE WORLD’S most effective conventional antimalarial drug was derived from the sweet wormwood plant, Artemisia annua, which had been used by Chinese doctors for 2,000 years. Today wormwood tea is being used in parts of Africa for malaria treatment and prevention, although the World Health Organization frowns on it... Credit: Brendan Borrell
RESEARCHERS Merlin Willcox and Bertrand Graz visit an herb garden cultivated at a Ugandan outpost for the German organization Action for Natural Medicine. The organization helps villagers learn to cultivate their own Artemisia annua and make antimalarial tea from it... Credit: Brendan Borrell
MERLIN WILLCOX and Bertrand Graz led a workshop at Makerere University in Kampala in February 2013 to help African scientists run their own clinical trials on herbal medicines. Credit: Brendan Borrell
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WORKSHOP ATTENDEE Maud Kamatenesi of the Natural Chemotherapeutics Research Laboratory at the Ugandan Ministry of Health (middle) went on to run a so-called retrospective treatment outcome study on plants that local women use to treat malaria in southwestern Uganda... Credit: Brendan Borrell
TRADITIONAL MEDICINE in Africa also has a dark side. “We treat fibroids. We treat syphilis. Gonorrhea. Sinus headache. Body rashes. Warts. Diarrhea,” says Yasire Ssebeliba, an entrepreneur who runs a mini medical empire in a Kampala slum... Credit: Brendan Borrell
The world urgently needs new drugs for malaria and other diseases. In the June Scientific American science writer Brendan Borrell describes an approach to drug discovery that is gaining momentum: reverse pharmacology. Researchers are observing patients who are already taking traditional herbal remedies, identifying the most promising ones and then conducting clinical trials of those natural products. Borrell reported on herbal medicines as an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow. Snapshots from his reporting trip to Uganda follow.
This article was originally published with the title "Seeds of a Cure" in Scientific American 310, 6, (June 2014)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Brendan Borrell is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He writes for Bloomberg Businessweek, Nature, Outside, Scientific American, and many other publications, and is the co-author (with ecologist Manuel Molles) of the textbook Environment: Science, Issues, Solutions. He traveled to Brazil with the support of the Mongabay Special Reporting Initiative. Follow him on Twitter @bborrell.
