Nigerian government trains herbal medicine practitioners

The Chinese news agency Xinhua notes this interesting development in Nigeria:

ABUJA, Aug 30, 2007 (Xinhua via COMTEX) — Nigeria’s Ministry of Health has started training herbal medicine practitioners on drug preparation and management, said a representative of the practitioners here on Thursday.

“We are grateful to the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and Ministry of Science and Technology for taking us to seminars to teach us how to prepare drugs, the dosage and preservation,” Ayaba Otoce, chairman of National Association of Herbal Medicine Practitioners, was quoted by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) as saying.

She said there were some diseases, including acute staphylococcus, syphilis and candidiasis, that the orthodox medicine could not cure, but were curable by herbal medicine.

The Economist plugs herbal medicine

August 18, 2007

The Economist highlights the efforts of the Golden Triangle Partnership and their work in India to conduct clinical trials on herbal treatments in India:

Most Indian herbal remedies are based on the Ayurvedic system of medicine, although Tamil-based Siddha and Unani, which has Persian roots, are also used extensively. Proving their worth is a daunting task. There are 80,000 Ayurvedic treatments alone, involving the products of some 3,000 plants. More than 7,000 firms make herbal compounds for medical use. Establishing the active ingredients and exactly how they work would thus take some time.

The Golden Triangle Partnership is not, however, looking for new molecules to turn into chemically pure drugs. Instead, it proposes to make herbal medicine itself more scientific by conducting clinical trials of traditional treatments for more than 20 medical conditions. These include arthritis, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, malaria and psoriasis.

To do that means getting the country’s drug companies to take part in what is, for them, the non-traditional activity of traditional medicine. One of these firms, Ranbaxy, has already opened a small research and development division for herbal medicine and is beginning to look at remedies for conditions such as diabetes.

To encourage such developments the project’s partners are trying to identify how the potency of herbs varies with exposure to the sun, the type of soil in which they are grown, and when and how they are harvested. With that information, they can define standard doses and clinical trials can begin. If the trials succeed, the treatments that result should be patentable–unlike the traditional formulations.

The article points out that the Indian government is also concerned that several of the medicinal plants harvested from the wild are endangered.