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The South African government estimates that 20,000 tons of medicinal plants are used by at least 27 million South African consumers each year. Included among them are some highly questionable mixtures marketed as HIV/AIDS remedies. One of the more popular is a concoction called Ubhejani, the Zulu word for rhino, which is sold in plastic bottles on the streets of Durban and elsewhere in KwaZulu-Natal. University of Cape Town economist Nicoli Nattrass, an expert on the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on South Africa, criticizes the government for being lax in its regulation of untested remedies. A Ubhejani proponent, for example, was named recently to the Presidential Task Team on African Traditional Medicines, a group charged with developing a regulatory framework for such remedies. Gareth Morgan, a health expert with the main opposition party, wants to ban Ubhejani and other remedies until they are tested. "An appropriate evaluation system for traditional medicines will be of enormous benefit to South Africans," Morgan says. The use of traditional remedies is hardly limited to Africa. In the United States, nearly one-fifth of people surveyed used natural products, with the most common being echinacea extract, ginseng, ginko biloba, garlic supplements, glucosamine and St. John's wort. The NIH is supporting research on those and many other natural products. TICIPS manager Eugene Sickle, an organic chemist at UWC, embraces this focus on the big picture. "We look holistically at traditional medicine," he says, "[while] trying to explain the phytochemistry of the plants that are used." For example, one student is testing a number of over-the-counter Sutherlandia medications, including five tablets and two gels for anti-oxidant activity. While none of the packages claim the herb fights HIV infection, they advertise "immune booster," "anti-oxidant" or "immune modulator" qualities, as well as effectiveness against eczema, acne, psoriasis and shingles. "We have identified about 100 plants that we would like to look into, but the costs of clinical trials are very high," says Sickle. "So we narrowed down that list to about ten." The first of them to be clinically tested is Sutherlandia. At the Edendale Hospital, a giant, red-brick complex in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, men and women wearing traditional Zulu sangoma gear, including colorful costumes and beaded headdresses, file into lecture rooms to meet with doctors specializing in HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The healers are part of a program organized by the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Nelson Mandela Medical School, partially funded by U.S. dollars, to try to bridge the wide gap between African traditional and Western medicines. More specifically, it seeks to encourage the traditional healers to refer people with the symptoms of HIV/AIDS to specialists at the Edendale clinics. Edendale is one of the major treatment facilities for HIV/AIDS patients in KwaZulu-Natal. About 60 percent of the hospital's patients, including 44 percent of pregnant women, are HIV-positive, says Edendale's chief of medicine Doug Wilson, the South African physician who is leading the Sutherlandia trial together with clinical psychologist Kathy Goggin of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. "This is the first time a traditional medicine has undergone such a clinical trial in Africa," Wilson says. |
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Published by the Office of Research. ©2008 Curators of the University of Missouri. Click here to contact the editor.
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