America Latina – Italia: innovazione nella tradizione dell’etnofarmacopea per il futuro sostenibile
Grandi Maurizio, Baiocchi Claudio, Ballati Arianna
La Torre di Maurizio Grandi
CUCS22 Napoli, 21-22-23 Aprile 2022
INTRODUCTION
• 70% of Western diseases are treated with herbal remedies.
• 1/4 of pharmaceutical prescriptions contain active ingredients extracted from tropical plants, and 6/10 of Western drugs derive from Southern healing systems.
• 15% of the 300,000 known plants are used in a traditional therapeutic way.
• 80% of the world’s inhabitants treat themselves with plants.
• Because of pollution and deforestation, 65,000 extinctic plant species in the last century (out of the 800,000 that probably currently existing).
• The 2020 is the year the Amazon broke the world record for forest fires,
• Timber production yielded less than $200 million, $60 billion could have been obtained by producing medicines from natural available and renewable resources.
• The registration procedures require thousands of pages of documentation,
pharmacological, toxicological and clinical tests. A clinical trial – requires testing on 30,000 patients. – from $800,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 – over 25 years. Too much money invested to isolate only 1 active molecule.
The need of proper certification, the lengthy registrations standards built for today’s “globalized” market, on the “molecular” models of the western nations, slow down the spread of herbal products especially in developing countries.
Anthropocentric medical tradition: it primarily meets the specific needs of man, resorting, when necessary, to control diseases before knowing their causes, making use of medicines able to improve the duration and quality of life, but unrelated to the composition and physiology of our body.
Naturalistic medical tradition: it starts from the observation of natural mechanisms and does not aim to constrain or suppress them, but to respect and enhance them. This includes medicines that cure diseases by correcting the deficiency from which they arise or by activating natural defensive processes, shaped and tested by millennia of use, such as medicinal plants. They are characterized by the interest in the fundamentals of the disease, which develops along different paths: the cultural or ethological roots of traditional plants, the phylogenetic evolution of the function of natural substances, which help to understand their therapeutic value.
The definition of HEALTH has recently been updated. The distribution of wealth as it is, is no longer sustainable. The gap between those who are well and those who are not well is getting bigger. We need to invest, invest ourselves in a process that allows us to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the possibility of future generations. Responsibility.
All species fight to survive. Bacteria fight antibiotics through resistance, causing the replication of new spontaneous mutated generations every 20 minutes. Every year one and a half million people die from bacteria, which was once treatable. In 2050 we will be 10 billion, developed countries invest in bacteriophages, low-dose antibiotics for farm animals contaminate land and water. In a few years we will find ourselves in a condition similar to the pre-antibiotic era.
What is the global plan for future sustainability?
In the next article we will present our proposals…
