Dialogues: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Africa’s traditional practitioners and the war against the coronavirus

hi gloria

reflections on your comments on traditional medicine.

the only issue is what works. but i think of science as building bodies of knowledge, and when you have a new disease, a new strain, what body of knowledge is there in the traditional canopy of treatments?

quinine isn't a good example since they had had hundreds of years of usage in s america.

what bothers me is when people turn away from something that works, for ethnocentric reasons. a propos, wasn't the latest round of malaria medications built on a chinese pharmacology that had used some plant in china, originally?

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.emeagwali@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 28, 2020 9:04 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Africa's traditional practitioners and the war against the coronavirus

Africa's traditional medical practitioners are in search of a cure for the corona virus. Let us support them fully.

Practitioners in Mali, Benin and Ethiopia seem to be on the trail, and all eyes should be on them. We wish them success on behalf of humanity.

To that sizable group of skeptics and "doubting Thomases"- who are prone to present a litany of woes and indictments against traditional medicine, there is one question I want to ask:

Where do you think chloroquine came from? For generations, Native American traditional practitioners utilized the bark of the cinchona tree in the fight against malaria, and eventually saved thousands of lives around the globe in the process. The pharmaceutical corporations took note, at some point, creating synthetic versions of the plant, whose molecular structure they deciphered. Trials of chloroquine, for coping with the corona virus is proceeding as we speak.

So is there not another tree bark with parallel or even greater potential, in Africa's local therapeutic and pharmaceutical arsenal?

The search by the local traditional scientists must go on. They need governmental and public support and, thankfully, in some cases seem to be getting that.

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