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Mum knows best: Homemade soup may fight malaria
PARIS, Nov 19, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Some soups may be good for more than just
the soul.
A new study suggests that certain homemade broths — made from chicken,
beef or even just vegetables — might have properties that can help fight
malaria.
Researcher Jake Baum of Imperial College London asked children from diverse
cultural backgrounds at state-funded Eden Primary School to bring in homemade
clear soup broth from recipes that had been passed down across generations to
treat fever. The samples were filtered and incubated with cultures of
Plasmodium falciparum, a parasite that accounts for an estimated 99.7 percent
of malaria cases in Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Of 56 soup samples tested, five were more than 50 percent effective in
curbing growth of the parasite, two with similar success as one drug
currently used to treat malaria, Baum and his team reported Tuesday in the
Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Four other soups were more than 50 percent effective at blocking parasites
from maturing to be able to infect mosquitoes, which transmit the disease.
“When we started getting soups that worked — in the lab under very
restricted conditions, I should add — we were really happy and excited,”
Baum told AFP in an email.
But he noted that it was unclear which ingredients had the antimalarial
properties.
“If we were serious about going back and finding the magic ingredient, like
good scientists, we’d have to do it in a very standardised way,” he said.
– ‘Golden recipes’ –
The soups came from families from diverse ethnic backgrounds, including
Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, and had a variety of base
ingredients, including chicken, beef, beetroot and cabbage.
Much to the pleasure of the vegetarians involved in the study, Baum noted,
the veggie-only soups showed similar results to the meat-based ones.
Baum said he had wanted to teach children the process through which
scientific research can turn an herbal remedy into a synthetically produced
medicine.
He pointed to the success of Professor Dr Tu Youyou of China, who in the
1970s was instrumental in isolating and extracting an antimalarial substance
from quinhao, an herb used in Eastern medicine to treat fever for some two
thousand years.
This research led to the synthetic production of artemisinin — a drug now
widely used to treat malaria — and won Tu the Nobel Prize in 2015.
Emerging resistance to drugs treating the disease — which kills some
400,000 people a year — means scientists have to “look beyond the chemistry
shelf for new drugs”, Baum noted in a press release.
“The lesson from me was more that there may well be golden recipes out
there in the world for disease that remain untapped.”
BSS/AFP/SSS/1557 hrs