This morning I would like to tell you something about Natural Medicine, something about my organisation anamed and then later in my talk I will say something about how we use solar energy with Natural Medicine. My friend from Congo will say just a brief word about his project, in which both Natural Medicine and solar energy very much come together.
We heard already this morning, that one or two people in this conference have fallen ill. What do we do if we fall ill in Düsseldorf? We would have a number of choices, we could go to the chemist or maybe, if we feel really bad, we could see a doctor.
If we were to go to the chemist, would we ask: "What natural remedies do you have?" In German pharmacies there is a big range of herbal medicines, that contain, for example, eucalyptus, sage, peppermint, lime flowers. There are many more natural remedies that one would typically find in a British pharmacy. In our house, if anybody begins to cough and sneeze, we go straight to the chemist and we ask for "Umckaloabo". It is wonderful! Much better than anything else we have come across. It comes from a plant in South Africa and, like so many things, it was discovered by chance a lot of years ago.
At the turn of the 19th century an Englishman, who was suffering from tuberculosis went to South Africa, where he met a traditional healer who cured him. He was so impressed, of course, because nobody in Britain succeeded in solving his problem. He inquired what the plant was and today in Germany, but curiously not in Britain, it is widely marketed. Not so much for TB, but for bronchitis.
Today an increasing number of people prefer "natural" treatments, but other people of course say: "No, I trust the conventional medicine, it is much more scientifically based, and on the package we can read the correct dosage and about all the side effects.
Well, here in Germany and in most of Europe, we can choose. In many regions of the world, however, certainly in many parts of Africa, people do not have the luxury of being able to choose between conventional and herbal or traditional medicine. They are controlled by the money in their pockets and by what is actually available.
I would like to tell you how anamed began. It was initiated by my colleague, a gentleman by the name of Hans Martin Hirt, clearly not an Englishman! He is pharmacist and he was working in what was then known as Zaire. His job was to be responsible for the import of pharmaceuticals for hospitals in a particular region. In the course of the six years he was there, he saw the prices of the imported pharmaceuticals going up and up, and, at the same time, the ability of the hospitals and the patients to pay for these pharmaceuticals went down and down. The income of people in real terms was falling all the time.
An analysis of the cost of tablets for sleeping sickness is very illustrative. At the start of my colleague's stay, to earn the money to buy one treatment for sleeping sickness a teacher had to work for three hours. At the end of his stay, which was only 6 years remember, this same teacher had to work not for three hours, and not even for 3 months, but for three years in order to earn the money needed to buy one treatment for sleeping sickness, because the prices had gone up and his ability to pay, his income, had actually gone down. These figures were influenced very much by the rate of exchange between the local currency and the US dollar.
My colleague quickly recognised that, in Zaire, like in all African countries, there are a hole host of people who have a lot of experience of using locally available plants to treat their complaints and diseases. My colleague became very interested in this, and he says that he spent his apprenticeship for six years in Zaire, at the feet of traditional healers.
At the end of this period of time, he was able to put together in a book, first in French and then, I am happy to say, in English, a report of more than sixty plants, which can be used for a whole range of complaints and diseases, together with the recipes which describe how these plants may be used to make good quality medicines.
As I said, my friend is a pharmacist, and he has, therefore, from his profession a lot of knowledge about how to take raw materials and transform them into good medicines. Here is an example of a medicine, it is made from chamomile, a plant that is very common here in Germany. It is an ointment, and as such it will keep for two years, no problem. The process is fairly straight forward. We take the flowers of the chamomile and dry them, and then heat them in vegetable oil on a water bath for about an hour. We use a water bath so that the temperature doesn't go over 100 degrees centigrade, which ensures that the active ingredients are not destroyed. Then we add some melted beeswax and, very simply, we have a good medicine.
Of course, whilst making such a medicine we must take care to work hygienically. Other simple medicines include teas, which are usually made by pouring boiling water over the leaves of a particular plant, which may be fresh or dried. Tinctures, which are made with alcohol, demand a bit more care in their preparation, but have the advantage that they can be kept for a long time.
I think that one of the reasons why people are often suspicious of traditional medicine is that they are given something that has no label. They want to know what is in it, how old it is and how much they should take. There are not always clear answers to these questions, neither from the label nor from the practitioner.
So I want to define what, in anamed, we mean by Natural Medicine, and how it differs from traditional medicine in particular. We define Natural Medicine as being the combination of the advantages of traditional medicine and modern conventional medicine.
What are the advantages of traditional medicine? Well, the traditional healer is usually near at hand, and he or she uses plants which are locally available. Not a lot of money is involved, often payment can be made in kind in the form of other goods or services. And of course, he certainly doesn't have to pay somebody else to import the goods from another country.
What are the advantages of modern medicine? Well, it is hygienically prepared, is well researched and there is always a clear label and the dosages and side effects are clearly given.
So, is it possible to bring together the advantages of the traditional medicine and conventional medicine? That is what we try to do in Natural Medicine. Natural Medicine can also be described as "building on traditional practice by developing accurate, reproducible recipes for the production of medicines from medicinal plants, for the treatment of medical complaints and infectious diseases in the Tropics".
Let me tell you a little about anamed. We are a very tiny outfit. There are two of us working in Winnenden, near Stuttgart. We both work from home and we have a minimum of financial support. If people write us asking for money, I am afraid, they get short shrift. But we have got a lot of energy and a lot of commitment, and slowly we are developing a network of people throughout the Tropics who are similarly committed and enthusiastic. anamed stands for "Action for Natural Medicine" or, in German, "Aktion für natürliche Medizin". We are a growing worldwide a network of traditional healers, conventional health workers, community development workers, church workers, scientists and others. Our aims are to enable people in the Tropics to become more self reliant in meeting their health needs.
How do we do this? Firstly, by encouraging people to cultivate their own medicinal plants in a medicinal garden. This is important for reasons of conservation; if everybody were to collect the same plant, because they have learnt that it is good for treating diarrhoea, then this plant would be in danger of disappearing.
Secondly, by encouraging people to grow and eat locally available fruit and vegetables. That might sound obvious, but you wouldn´t believe the number of people in Baden Württemberg, where I live, who prefer drinking Coca Cola to Apfelsaft! Even in our German universities, it is easier to buy Coca Cola than it is to buy locally produced apple juice. In some parts of Africa the situation is more serious, because people run to the shops for vitamin pills, which they can ill afford, and meanwhile they let their mangoes rot on the trees.
It is obvious of course that health is not only about treating diseases, it is also many other important aspects of life, for example clean hygienic conditions, pure drinking water, good sanitation, and a system of rubbish disposal. It is also about preferring good quality local produce to imported rubbish. Does that sound a bit strong, to talk about imported rubbish? Well, one of the most unethical things about our current economic system is that it is perfectly in order for people in Europe to export to Africa dangerous toxic materials. It happens extensively in the agricultural sector with, for example, the sale of dangerous pesticides. An example from the health sector is that within Europe soaps containing mercury are manufactured. Now within Europe itself their sale is prohibited because of their danger to human health, but their manufacture is not prohibited, nor is it prohibited to export them to Africa. In many African cities women believe that they are more beautiful if their skins are lighter, and these mercury-containing soaps are sold on the pretext that they lighten the skin. Perhaps you know that mercury is one of the most toxic substances that there is. And it does dreadful damage to the human body. But still these soaps are sold as beauty soaps.
Perhaps you now understand why I say, so strongly, that we encourage people to prefer good quality local produce rather than imported rubbish.
In anamed we have three major activities. We run week-long seminars in Natural Medicine in several African countries, and we write and produce quite a lot of publications and posters. (As a small thank you for attending our seminar this morning, these posters of 60 medicinal plants normally cost five Euro, but to you this morning, they are available for two Euros, and that will still give us a small contribution for our work.) Our third activity is to conduct research into healing plants.
I have brought one particular plant with me this morning, it is called Artemisia annua. Those of you who know anything about malaria will know that the fight against malaria continues. There was a period of time when the World Health Organisation thought they could defeat malaria by killing all the mosquitoes in the world and there was a worldwide campaign to spray homes and factories, indeed whole landscapes, with an insecticide called DDT, which was later discovered of course to have extensive and disastrous environmental consequences. But these clever old mosquitoes were not going to be beaten by DDT, and they developed a resistance to DDT. Then later the decision was: if we can't kill the mosquitoes, let's try to kill the plasmodium that carry the malaria in the blood. Quinine and chloroquine were developed which were very successful in treating malaria, although they do have some nasty side effects. But then the plasmodium developed a resistance to these drugs. So today, throughout the tropical world, there is great excitement about this particular plant, Artemisia annua, because this plant seems as successful as quinine, but without the nasty side effects.
The pharmaceutical industry extracts the active ingredient, called artemisinin, from this plant and sell it as tablets. But tablets in the shops in Mombassa and Kampala are pretty expensive, certainly out of the reach of most local people. When we conduct seminars in Natural Medicine we take the seeds of these plants with us, and we show people how to cultivate the plants. It is then possible for the people in a health centre or in a village to become almost totally independent in the treatment of malaria. It requires a lot of work, but for absolutely no cost, they are then able to treat the patients of the health centre or the members of the community at almost no cost. We don't make tablets from these leaves, we harvest the leaves and make a simple tea. The instructions and dosage are very well documented in our materials. We have benefited learned from the Chinese experience with this particular plant. A further advantage of our approach of course is that that there is much less likelihood of developing a resistance to a tea, than there is to an isolated chemical that is extracted from a plant.
Now let me show some slides. The first shows a lady who is relatively small and carrying an enormous weight of charcoal, maybe 40kg, perhaps even more than her own body weight. The production of charcoal in many regions is causing quite a disaster, because the more trees they cut down, then the more the landscape is transformed to savannah, and of course it can progress to become very arid indeed. So this is not just a loss of timber and wood, but the loss of trees results in a loss of biodiversity, and a loss of sources of food.
I don´t know if many of you enjoy caterpillars for breakfast, but there are certainly some regions in Congo where caterpillars are very nutritious and form an important part of the diet.
Another result of deforestation of course is that women have to walk even further to collect the firewood. There is also a shortage of wood for furniture building and housing.
When the trees disappear, soil erosion sets in, which causes a terrible loss of fertility, not to mention the destruction of roads and landscapes. This picture shows a market right on the edge of an enormous void caused simply by the heavy tropical rains.
In our seminars we emphasise the use of locally available resources. Primarily we are talking about local available plants that we can use as medicine, but the sun is of course just as important as a locally available resource. This picture shows a young man, a refugee from Rwanda, who took part in one of our seminars in Tanzania, where we worked together to construct a solar oven. A solar oven based on the ULOG design, that you can see outside.
These ladies are delighted to see the solar oven appearing, because every year they grow maize, but the problem is that the maize only keeps for three or four months before it is eaten by a hole variety of insects. They were very happy when somebody in the village bought a motorcyle and the motorcycle came in a big wooden box. Being resourceful, the local people used this wooden box to construct a particularly big solar oven using the basic design of a ULOG solar oven. In this particular oven they succeeded in drying 20 kg of maize each day. The temperature achieved in the oven is such that it destroys the insects and the bacteria. Just to demonstrate that these oven do achieve a significant temperature, on one occasion we put slices of banana in the oven and we forgot about them - this picture shows that these pieces of banana were totally charred and destroyed as a result of the temperature being too high.
This is a picture shows our colleague Emmanuel, who also works in the Congo. He works in a project in which he leads seminars in Natural Medicine which include the construction of solar ovens. Here he is working with a women´s group.
In Kinshasa an anamed hospital has been established. We are quite proud of that, really. This hospital has been established to practice Natural Medicine and of course has become a local centre for training and teaching.
An important part of our seminars is growing Artemisia annua and this picture shows how we demonstrate how to grow it using very simple equipment.
This drier is based on the ULOG drier outside, made from waste materials. Glass was not immediately available - in many regions, glass is very difficult to obtain. Usually there is a supply of clear plastic sheeting. So this drier was constructed simply using wood, found locally, plus clear plastic sheeting. It did a very good job drying mangoes, jackfruit, pineapples and bananas.
A ULOG solar oven takes a certain amount of skill to construct and we discovered that simply using a cardboard box with aluminium foil on the reflectors works fairly well. After we held a seminar in South Africa in which we and extolled the virtues of the solar oven, this man went away and he built his own. He is a pastor and his wife has set up an Aids project, and they are working with the community with the victims and their families. He has established around this small project a garden of medicinal plants and he uses this solar oven regularly to dry the leaves from this garden.
They, like other projects, have discovered, that certain herbal teas are very helpful for Aids patients. This is an understatement, because some Aids patients did not really have the energy to get out of bed in the morning. When they started to drink tea from lemongrass, a very common plant in the tropics, or in fact artemisia tea, it made a vast difference to their energy level and to the immunity against opportunistic infections. So he has a full time job, because he dries leaves regularly, which they sell in very small packets at absolute minimal cost to the visitors to their health centre, on the principle, that if they charge something, then it is going to be better used as if they give it away. These packets of dried leaves are in great demand.
This picture shows me with a group of people in Uganda. Predominantly traditional healers and as you can see, we were meeting in a conventional African hut with a copy of our poster on the wall. Posters are a wonderful teaching aid. You have only got to turn up in a village and put it on the ground and immediately people come around and they say, ah, yes, I know that plant, and yes, that is so and so, and then of course you say, what you use this particular plant for? Then the seminar has begun, even without a word of introduction!
I think you will recognize that it happens very commonly that people do their washing in rivers and lakes, whilst other people take water out of the river for drinking.
This picture shows people are collecting water in the Kumi district of Uganda from the local water hole - it is not terribly clean. Ideally it needs to go through a filter. An alternative is what has become known as the Sodis system for treating water. A plastic bottle that is painted black on the underside is filled with water and laid in the sun. As a result of the combination of the effects of the increased temperature and the ultraviolet light, in the course of a day, water can become good enough for drinking.
This picture is from Rusinga Island in Kenya, where a lady is enthusiastically explaining to the seminar participants how this system works. They collect the water from the Lake Victoria and put it in bottles on a table with a top of corrugated iron painted black. On a hot sunny day 3 hours are supposed to be long enough, but to leave it the whole day is the best thing.
Chillies - the smaller they are, the hotter they are. This is exactly the medicinal property that is so useful in this particular plant. In our book "Natural Medicine in the Tropics" a person from the Congo states that he used to buy rheumatism ointment, until he realised that the most useful plant for treating his rheumatism was actually growing just out his front door. Using this plant we can make an excellent ointment for rheumatism.
This picture shows the technique: The chillies are dried, and heated in oil on a water bath for about an hour. But I think you can now realize why the solar oven is so useful and valuable, because if you put the water bath directly in a solar oven and you can forget about it for an hour, because unlike with a wood-fire a solar oven will not get out of control.
These two men are both traditional healers and they are getting great delight from massaging the ointment into their muscles. This lady, Theresa, a community worker with a peace project in Uganda called CHIPS, became very enthusiastic about this particular ointment. Sitting next to her on this picture is her patient, a man who is very grateful to her, because he had a skin problem, he was itching all over and this particular ointment succeeded in helping him.