Category: Medicinal plants

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Health and agriculture

To follow the last post, here’s a photo-essay from the BBC on another useful insect, the “desert shrimp,” better known as the locust. Useful? Well, that may be overstating the case, but they are widely eaten in the Sahara, deep fried in vegetable oil. I have tried them. Not as bad as one might think.

Anyway, what I really wanted to alert you all to is that the latest Spore and New Agriculturalist are out. There are lots of interesting pieces, both brief and longer, but is it a coincidence that both issues focus on aspects of agriculture and health? Spore has a feature on “functional foods” here, things that provide disease prevention as well as nutrition. New Agriculturalist has number of articles on various different aspects of the topic here, plus other sources of information.

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Traditional herbal medicine in Kenya

A draft policy addressing how to use and conserve herbal medicine was launched in Kenya last November to stimulate public debate before being taken to Parliament. A long article in the Saturday Nation today discusses the policy, and in particular the possibility of public hospitals dispensing traditional herbal medicines. Here’s a quote from the policy (reproduced in the article: I haven’t been able to find a copy of the policy on the internet) to give you the flavour: “A choice of modern diagnostic techniques and option of treatment by either traditional medicine or conventional medicine within the health care system will be encouraged.” According to the article, other issues discussed by the policy include “conservation, production and domestication, safety and efficacy, and commercialisation.” As an example, there are information and photographs on the cultivation and commercialization of native medicinal plants in Kenya here.

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Opium poppies

There are a couple of interesting articles in this week’s print issue of The Economist, but they are both premium content on the web, so I’ve dug a bit deeper for you and will post on them separately. One article contrasts the global shortage of opiates for medical use with the efforts being made to stop Afghani farmers growing the opium poppy for the heroin trade. A crazy situation. One possible solution is licensing farmers to grow the crop under strict controls, but that is not without difficulties, especially in a place like Afghanistan. However, there is a possible scientific solution. It turns out that Tasmania, of all places, is an important opium poppy producer, and researchers at “Tasmanian Alkaloids recognised that there was a possibility of breeding a poppy variety in which the biosynthetic pathway stopped at thebaine instead of going on to produce morphine.” That would make it ok for therapeutic opiate production but useless for the illicit drug trade. You can read all about it here. There’s a paper on poppy transformation here and one on poppy genetic diversity here.

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Project Baseline

The work at UV Irvine summarized here on the genetic effects of climate change on different kinds of plants is interesting enough. But what particularly intrigued me was the reference to a Project Baseline, “a national effort to collect and preserve seeds from contemporary plant populations.” Unfortunately I was not able to find anything more about this on the internet. Anyway, sounds like they need something similar in Armenia.

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Stiffing it to the Maca patent

Maca (Lepidium meyenii) is in the news again thanks to a report from Associated Press. (There’s a version here, and many others around the place.) The gist of the article is that a US patent on Maca’s libido-enhancing compounds, granted to PureWorld Botanicals in 2001, is not valid. “Peruvian officials called the patent an ’emblematic case’ of biopiracy and are preparing to challenge it in U.S. courts,” the report says. It goes on to examine other cases of biopiracy and the use by pharmaceutical companies of compounds found in nature.