Health

Make Traditional Medicine Practice Beneficial, NOA Tells Stakeholders

By Web News 407

By Oluwatoyin Adegoke

Those involved in traditional medicine have been encouraged to promote environmental renewal by growing plants and rearing animals that will be useful in enhancing the traditional ways of addressing economic and health challenges in the country.

The Director General, the National Orientation Agency, NOA, Mr Lanre-Issa-Onilu made the submission in Abeokuta, Ogun State while flagging off the campaign for Mass Participation in Biodiversity Conservation and Traditional Knowledge Development. 

The initiative, put together in partnership with the African Biodiversity and Traditional Knowledge Research and Development Project was aimed at facilitating the mass cultivation of medicinal and economic plants, including timbers, coconut and Alligator pepper and others for the use of traditional medicine practitioners.

Mr Issa-Onilu, who was represented by the Ogun State Director of the NOA, Mr Kolawole Obadina said the move would help in protecting the environment from activities capable of damaging the natural habitat which according to him, had brought negative consequences on the ecosystem.

In a keynote address, the President of the African Biodiversity and Traditional Knowledge Research and Development Project, Alhaji Shuaibu Aro said the campaign would be extended to all parts of the state, particularly rural communities while pledging the introduction of capacity-building programmes for stakeholders on the need to conserve and preserve nature’s gift.

Alhaji Aro explained that arrangements had been concluded to enrol 5,000 applicants for the Project in different developmental areas with 4,000 of them focusing on farming the necessary plants as raw materials for traditional medicine. 

The Director of Biomedicinal Research Centre, Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria, Ibadan, Oyo State, Dr Ibraheem Lawal expressed optimism that the development of traditional medicine would help to reduce the nation’s reliance on orthodox medicines and allied products and preservation of the product would assist in standardizing operations in the sector. 

In the lecture entitled, “Utilizing Biodiversity Conservation and the Development of Traditional Medicine for Massive Self-sustainable Employment Opportunities and National Economic Development” Dr Lawal appealed to government at all levels to scale up efforts in preserving natural resources to boost employment opportunities and promote economic sustainability.

Earlier, the National Coordinator of the Project, Mr Taoreed Adefolakan had maintained that all hands must be on deck in charting the path of generational rebirth in African biodiversity and traditional knowledge.

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Foreign

China Approves Sale of Traditional Medicine Products to Treat Covid-19

By Web News 878

China has approved three traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) products for sale to help treat Covid-19, the government’s National Medical Products Administration announced on Wednesday.

The agency used a special approval procedure to green-light the three products, which “provide more options for Covid-19 treatment,” it said in a statement.

The herbal products come in granular form and trace their origins to “ancient Chinese prescriptions,” said the statement. They were developed from TCM remedies that had been used early in the pandemic, and that were “screened by many academics and experts on the front line.”

The three products are “lung-clearing and detoxing granules,” “dampness-resolving and detoxing granules,” and “lung-diffusing and detoxing granules,” said the statement.

The safety and effectiveness of TCM is still debated in China, where it has both adherents and skeptics. Though many of the remedies in TCM have been in use for hundreds of years, critics argue that there is no verifiable scientific evidence to support their supposed benefits.

In recent years, ancient remedies have been repeatedly hailed as a source of national pride by Chinese President Xi Jinping, himself a well-known TCM advocate.

“Traditional medicine is a treasure of Chinese civilization embodying the wisdom of the nation and its people,” Xi told a national conference on TCM in October 2019. Throughout the outbreak, Xi has repeatedly exhorted doctors to treat patients with a mix of Chinese and Western medicines.

Tens of thousands of Covid-19 patients received herbal remedies alongside mainstream antiviral

drugs last year, according to the Ministry of Science and Technology.

“By adjusting the whole body health and improving immunity, TCM can help stimulate the patients’ abilities to resist and recover from the disease, which is an effective way of therapy,” said Yu Yanhong, deputy head of China’s National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, in March 2020.

In a clinical trial of 102 patients with mild symptoms in Wuhan, patients with combined treatments compared with the control group of patients receiving only Western medicine, Yu said. Their recovery rate was 33% higher, she added.

By late March last year, China had gotten its outbreak largely under control — and though it has endured occasional flare-ups in various locations, numbers have stayed low and daily life has resumed. Restrictions have been lifted, allowing people to travel around the country and gather without face masks.

Authorities have praised TCM as helping contain Covid symptoms and limit the outbreak — in January this year, up to 60,000 doses of TCM were sent to front-line police officers to protect them from Covid-19, according to the TCM administration.

A number of provinces, including Jilin and Hebei, implemented “TCM Prevention Plans” in January to prescribe TCM to Covid patients.

Now, authorities are looking to expand the industry, which was estimated to exceed 3 trillion yuan ($430 billion) by 2020.

The country will aim to cultivate 100,000 TCM professionals within the next 10 years, and implement measures such as TCM curricula in schools, announced the General Office of the State Council this February. More TCM rehabilitation centers will be built, some with clinical research centers.

State media has also promoted TCM in its coverage; state-run news agency Xinhua reported that TCM offered a source of “hope” for Chinese Americans in New York when the city’s public health system was close to collapse, and that remedies have been adopted by Kuwait for Covid treatment.

The World Health Organization, which gave its first-ever endorsement of TCM in 2018, had originally advised against using traditional herbal remedies for Covid-19 on its website — though that line was later removed due to it being “too broad.”

Some in the biomedical community say WHO overlooked the toxicity of some herbal medicine and the lack of evidence that it works, while animal rights advocates say it will further endanger animals such as the tiger, pangolin, bear and rhino, whose organs are used in some TCM cures.

CNN