In its quest to finding a plausible cure for the deadly coronavirus, the Ministry of Health has submitted 33 herbal medicines for testing.
The herbal medicines are products from the Ghana Federation of Traditional Healers.
The Deputy Director for the Centre for Plant Medicine Research, Dr Alfred Ampomah Appiah, said in addition to the 33 received from the health ministry, it continued to receive more herbal medicines for testing.
“On a daily basis, we continue to receive more herbal medicines from individuals. As as it stands now, we have over 60 individuals still submitting samples for testing,” JoyNews reported.
He further explained that that centre was testing the drugs to ascertain if the submitted drugs had certain antiviral properties to the novel coronavirus.
“What is being done globally is to test certain medicines that have already been selected to have certain antiviral properties and the prospects of those drugs are being monitored to test its effectiveness to the novel virus,” he added.
He also mentioned the fact that there are known herbs that treat diseases like chickenpox, measles and other viral diseases.
Similarly, he said that is what the centre is doing to ensure every alternative is fully exhausted in the fight against the deadly pandemic.
“So, what we are doing now is to look at the range, pick a few of them and re-test for antiviral properties. What we are interested in is a herb that has the potential to do something so far as coronavirus is concerned. So, we are experimenting with these other properties to find out if that’s plausible,” he stated.
There were earlier calls from individuals, organisations, political leaders for the government to seek other alternate measures to prevent the deadly coronavirus.
Former President John Dramani Mahama had called for the adoption of traditional medicine in the fight against coronavirus (COVID-19) in Ghana.
Currently, there is no known cure or vaccine for the virus, which has so far infected over two million people and killed over 120,000 others.
Across the world, scientists are on a mission to produce vaccines or cures for the novel coronavirus.
In Ghana, there are claims that a locally produced dietary supplement, COA FS, could cure COVID-19.
But authorities at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR) observed that it had neither been independently tested nor verified COA FS as a treatment for COVID-19.
As of April 22, 2020, Ghana’s coronavirus cases stood at 1,154 with 120 recoveries.
Regions that have reported cases remain the Greater Accra, Ashanti, Eastern, Northern, Volta, Upper East, Upper West, Central, Western, and North East.
Original article https://www.theghanareport.com/covid-19-remedy-health-ministry-submits-over-30-herbal-medicines-for-testing/
