Nobel Prize In Medicine Announced Today

Chinese Nobel Prize victor Tu Youyou gestures while speaking during an interview in her apartment in Beijing, Wednesday, October 7, 2015.

These two discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people in the world, according to Juleen R. Zierath, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

A Ghanaian health expert has called on the government to take steps to introduce the commercial cultivation of Artemisia Annua, a plant containing the active ingredient in the most effective malaria drug available, into the country.

On Monday it also earned its Chinese developer, Tu Youyou, a Nobel Medicine Prize. Tu is said to have lived there until she went to university in Beijing.

Artemisinin replaced chloroquine and sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine after the Plasmodium parasite, which causes malaria, developed resistance to both.

Tu and a team investigated more than 2,000 Chinese herb preparations and at first identified 640 that had possible antimalarial activity – but with no significant results in experiments with mice except for one: Artemisia annua extract. Across China this achievement is being portrayed as an endorsement of China’s academic standards, valuable scientific contributions and long-awaited global recognition for traditional medicine. “This is a proud moment for the Chinese people, and even more so for traditional Chinese medical practitioners”.

The scientist was congratulated by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang for her success, which “marked a great contribution of traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to the cause of human health”, AGI news agency highlighted on Tuesday. “The development of traditional Chinese medicine must be mutually integrated with science”, he said. The Communist Party’s media outlet, People’s Daily, openly criticized China’s leading academic institutions for previously ignoring Dr Tu, stating, she “is frank about her disapprovals and disinclined towards bootlicking”. The USA side had also invested a large sum of money to screen more than 200,000 compounds but was unable to find an effective treatment.

Malaria was easy to cure with early diagnosis and the help of Artemisinin, Zhang said, adding the high mortality rates occurred in Angola mostly among pregnant women or children under the age of five from impoverished families in remote areas of the country.