Saturday, June 09, 2007

G8 Hoax

The World Health Organization (WHO), which governs these programs, straddles two sides of a fence, enacting programs that quell disease on one hand and other programs that control population size on the other. It’s difficult to determine which side of the fence WHO is on at any given moment. Malaria control and treatment programs are an example.

Li Guoqiao, who has been involved in malaria treatment for 60 years at the Tropical Medicine Institute at Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, says potent antimalarial drugs which were developed by Chinese scientists are not being used to their full potential. Li Guoqiao says mass treatment should begin among the people living on Moheli Island, a small African island where malaria is widespread.

The drug that Li Guoqiao wants to use is artemisinin (derived from the wormwood herb), but WHO says its use must be guardedly employed to prevent the onset of drug resistance. [United Press International June 6, 2007] Resistance to existing anti-malarial drugs is rising, a problem that is now called a catastrophe in poor tropical countries.

But drug resistance, either in lab dishes or in clinical practice, has never been observed for artemisinin. A 2003 report published in the journal Current Medicinal Chemistry calls artemisinin “a fantastic antimalarial drug from a traditional Chinese herb.” [Current Medicinal Chemistry 10: 2197-230, 2003] Artemisinin is so powerful that less than 100,000 malaria-causing parasites remain after 3 days of treatment and it is excreted rapidly from the body so as to limit any side effects.

Yet researchers continue to insist that it would be “unwise to consider that resistance to these compounds (artemisinin) cannot occur.” [Philo Transactions Royal Society London 354: 739-49, 1999]

Some researchers describe the imagined future threat for drug resistance from the use of artemisinin as potentially “devastating for individuals with malaria.” If the sole use of artemisinin without any other accompanying antimalarial drugs is “devastating,” how should the drugs that invariably induce drug resistance, and result in avoidable loss of thousands of lives, be characterized?

On January 19, 2006 the World Health Organization issued a strange bulletin. It called for an immediate halt to the production of artemisinin as a single malaria drug, under the guise that it might induce drug resistance, and mandated artemisinin be used in combination with other existing anti-malaria drugs. This would keep anti-malarial drug under the control of doctors and pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Lee Jong-wook, WHO’s director general, said it is important that anti-malarial drugs be used correctly. The WHO directive also aimed at so-called counterfeit anti-malaria drugs being distributed by uncooperative drug manufacturers. Counterfeit drugs were simply versions of artemisinin that were being sold outside the control of the drug companies.

Artemisinin is a drug that is not patentable. It has been around for a long time. If used for the treatment of malaria, it would become the first blockbuster herbal drug to be used outside the array of patentable drug molecules pandered by pharmaceutical companies.

Researchers at the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany, point out that artemisinin is not only an antimalarial drug, but a “profound” weapon against cancer. [Planta Medica 73(4):299-309, April 2007] Artemisin poses a threat to the many toxic anti-cancer drugs that cancer cells invariably become resistant to over a short time.

One wonders if WHO is using delay tactics until a drug company can introduce its synthetic (fermented) version of artemisinin, which is claimed to reduce the cost of artemisinin from $2.40 to 25 cents per day. Amyris Biotechnologies is developing the more economical versions of artemisinin, buoyed by a $42.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This is odd. Bill Gates making contributions to a drug company? Amyris says charitable groups will distribute this drug to the masses, but doesn’t say how Amyris will make a profit. Two other private equity groups have invested $20 million in this venture and obviously expect their investment to yield handsome profits. 

Amyris’s new chief executive, John G. Melo, was previously British Petroleum’s president for fuel operations in the United States. Do you think Amyris will manipulate the market for malaria drugs in league with WHO so as to guarantee profits to Amyris?

The oil companies have learned how to rig supply and demand of refined oil in order to gouge Americans who purchase gasoline.

Germ resistance has not been demonstrated for natural molecules such as allicin from garlic, oleuropein from oregano, and artemisinin from Wormwood. The 300-350 million people diagnosed with malaria each year suffer while artemisinin is underutilized. Just exactly what is the real health agenda in Africa imposed by the World Health Organization? - Copyright 2007 Bill Sardi, Knowledge of Health, Inc.