Nature pays for human health

[Guest guest]

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3504894 & thesection=news & t

hesubsection=world

 

Nature pays for human health

 

31.05.2003

By FRED PEARCE

It felt and looked like a large black prune. But you can't be too careful.

" What is it? " I asked. " It's a birth sac, a placenta, " came the reply. " What

animal? " A brief smile. " Oh, a human. You take it for women's problems, and

to make you more beautiful. "

 

I hurriedly put it back on the market stall. I had heard of women frying

their own placenta for a post-delivery breakfast. But other people's

afterbirths? That sounded more like cannibalism than medicine.

 

I was in the heart of Hehuachi, the traditional-medicines market in Chengdu,

capital of China's Sichuan province. A giant hangar the size of a couple of

football pitches was packed with stalls selling herbs and spices, potions

and animal parts of every description. Some would not have been out of place

in a Western street market on a Saturday morning. But there was much that

was more exotic.

 

Immediately around me were hedgehog pelts reputed to cure rheumatism, dog's

kidneys that promoted sexual arousal, newts to treat stomach ache and dried

snakeskins for dunking in wine as a tonic.

 

There were all manner of deer and antelope parts - feet and tails, horns and

penises - jars of caterpillar fungus incongruously labelled in English, and

boxes full of tiny crabs and dried sea horses that, the stallholders

insisted, would bring me " youthfulness " .

 

Other delicacies on sale nearby included bat faeces, pangolin scales, seal

genitals, the fallopian tubes of frogs, toad venom, cuttlefish bones, and

dried geckos and leeches arranged in rows like so many chocolate bars on a

candy counter.

 

Hehuachi is but one outpost of a fast-growing trade in traditional wild

medicines that, thanks to freer markets, appears to have no limits. Based in

China, it is spreading round the world.

 

Many Westerners have tried to dismiss traditional Chinese medicine as a

witch's cauldron of false remedies and bogus aphrodisiacs. But the truth is

different, says Rob Parry-Jones, of Traffic, which monitors China's trade in

endangered species on behalf of conservation groups such as World Wildlife

Fund.

 

Many potions have been found successful in epidemiological trials. Research

conducted for WWF at the Chinese University of Hong Kong has found that both

rhino and saiga-antelope horn are effective for fevers and convulsions, for

instance.

 

Western drug companies have synthesised a surprising number of active

ingredients in Chinese medicines for use in their products.

 

The Chinese treat gallstones with bear bile. Western doctors have

synthesised what appears to be the active ingredient, tauro ursodeoxycholic

acid, to dissolve gallstones. (Interestingly, the only Chinese bear whose

bile does not contain this acid is the giant panda, which is also the only

bear from which the Chinese do not extract bile.)

 

Likewise, a 1500-year-old Chinese treatment for malaria uses a daisy called

artemesia, or wormwood. Its active ingredient is artemisin, which has

recently been adopted by Western doctors. It works by reacting with the high

iron concentrations in the malaria parasite, releasing free radicals that

kill it.

 

A plant used in China to fight asthma contains ephedrine, a stimulant

prescribed in the West for the same condition. And Western doctors recently

patented a version of a Chinese remedy for eczema that uses the root of the

peony shrub, apparently to strengthen the immune system.

 

The foremost chronicler of China's pharmacological history, Cai Jing-Feng of

the China Academy of Traditional in Beijing, is also a

doctor trained in the Western tradition.

 

He says that the philosophies behind the two traditions are very different.

Western doctors generally treat the disease or the diseased organ, while the

Chinese tradition is to treat the whole body to bolster its defences. But,

as some of the examples above show, the treatments are often much the same.

 

Even the ancient Chinese medical ideas that Western scientists find most

difficult to cope with, such as the notion of opposing forces of yin and

yang within the body, turn out to have a physiological reality, said Cai.

 

The yin and yang conditions diagnosed by Chinese doctors correspond to what

Western doctors identify as disturbances in chemical messengers in the

hormone system known as cAMP and cGMP.

 

" When doctors describe yin and yang as being out of balance in China,

Western doctors see a change in the ratio of the two chemical messengers in

the body, " says Cai. " In the yang condition, cAMP is low and cGMP is high.

In the yin, it is the reverse. "

 

In China, you are what you eat. And more and more Chinese are using

traditional medicines as food. Whatever the possible risks from overdosing

on active ingredients, the prevailing view is that the richer you get, the

more " health food " you should eat.

 

Economists have put the total value of the booming Chinese-medicine market

in wild products at between US$6 billion and $20 billion annually ($10.38

billion and $34.6 billion), 85 per cent based on plants, 13 per cent on

animals and 2 per cent on minerals.

 

Guo Yinfeng, author of a report on the trade for the Chinese Government's

endangered-species scientific commission, says that she met one woman

snake-seller in Anguo, in Hebei province, who offered to supply a tonne of

dried rat snakes from her warehouse, without notice. A trader in Qingping

market in Guangzhou told her that he sold 60 tonnes of seahorses a year.

 

Guo polled 13 of China's largest medicines manufacturers, who take the raw

ingredients and make the packaged products. They declared an annual turnover

between them of, among other things, 6000 tonnes of flying-squirrel faeces,

25 tonnes of leopard bones, 1600 tonnes of rat snakes, 200 tonnes of

pangolin scales, 500 tonnes of scorpions, and six million geckos. One

manufacturer alone used 10 tonnes of gall bladders extracted from snakes

each year.

 

Traditional Chinese medicine has, in the past, helped to protect some

species of plants and animals by encouraging people to preserve their

habitats, says Guo's colleague, Xie Yan. But all restraint seems to have

gone. " Now the trade is the biggest threat to wildlife, " said Xie.

 

Three months ago, scientists revealed that poachers had reduced the

population of saiga antelope in central Asia from more than a million to

just 30,000 in less than a decade - all to serve a Chinese medicinal market

for their powdered horns.

 

The threat extends to plants, too. Dendrobium candidum, an orchid that is

believed to cure hoarseness, is so rare that it now costs 12,000 times more

than wheat.

 

Both wild magnolia bark and liquorice are almost wiped out in China - the

latter largely at the hands of Chinese soldiers making pocket money by

digging up the plant while on duty in the country's northern border region,

which is called by some the " liquorice zone " .

 

China has responded to some of the international concerns. Bears are rarely

hunted for bile now. Instead, some 7000 are held on farms and " milked " ,

albeit in ways that have caused outrage among the animal-welfare community

in the West.

 

Tiger bones have been replaced by the bones of mole rats and leopards. But

sometimes the use of substitutes can backfire. Leopards are becoming rare.

And the recent slaughter of saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan had its origins in

the suggestions of conservationists a decade ago that saiga horn could be a

substitute for rhino horn.

 

Many in the West may recoil at their potions, but as the Chinese westernise

in many aspects of their lives, their traditional medicine persists.

 

Anyone for a prune?