Time flies with great content! Renew in to keep enjoying all our premium content.
Prime
Farmers reap profits with new herb used in drugs to fight malaria
Mr Henry Kiambati, a herbalist based in Meru , and farmers inspect the artemisia plant whose leaves extract is used in the manufacture of malaria drug. Some farmers in Kenya and Tanzania are dumping other crops in favour of the lucrative medicinal herb. file
A medicinal herb being used by pharmaceutical companies globally as an active ingredient to fight malaria has gained ground in Kenya and Tanzania where a multi-billion processing plant has been set up to turn the herb into the Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (ACTs), the new malaria drug that is now on the World Health Organisation’s essential medicines list.
The herb known as artemisia is native to Asia with wild population occurring in China and Vietnam but it became naturalised in many countries in the 1990s.
