Nature pays for human health

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 Chinese Medicine 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?

- INDEPENDENT