Associated Press reports that Indian scientists have rediscovered Begonia tessaricarpa, a plant believed to have medicinal properties that has not been seen for several decades. The full paper is here. Longer newspaper report here.
Fanciful flowers
A little feature in an Indian web site goes through a list of flowers and their curative properties within the Siddha system. Maybe some peg-legged biopirate would like to check ’em all out.
Let there be biofuels
There’s a lot of talk about biofuels these days, but perhaps not much on how growing biofuel crops might actually benefit poor people. So here’s an interesting story from India about how private firms are paying villagers to plant jatropha – traditionally the fruits were collected from the wild, placed on bamboo spikes and burned for light.
Trad jazz
A number of stories in the past few days have highlighted some novel initiatives to “mainstream” traditional medicine in Africa and China. First there was an article in The Economist on the effort by the Association for African Medicinal Plants Standards to develop a pharmacopoeia, or database of plants used in traditional medicine. By early next year this will include information on about 50 plants and how they are used across Africa. Then today there’s a report from a WHO meeting in Lusaka saying that institutionalizing traditional medicine would improve the care provided by African health systems. And there’s also news that the Chinese government has launched a programme to test the safety of traditional medicines, the latest in a series of projects on traditional medicine in China (see links at bottom of the page).