To do so, she and her team first contacted several practitioners of traditional medicine and obtained samples of 15 treatments employed against a range of NTDS.Some were mixtures of dried herbs, others watery concoctions.Her goal was to test their effectiveness against laboratory cultures of a variety of disease-causing parasites, with the aim of isolating any active principles they might contain.Nearly all the samples had some effect against one or more parasites.But one stood out in particular when used against the trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness.This was a dried mix of Aloe vera, a short-stemmed succulent, and Taraxacum officinale, the common dandelion.Intrigued by that discovery, the team put the crude sample they were working on through two rounds of chromatography, to split it into its constituents, and repeated the tests on these.Their analysis, just published in plos Neglected Tropical Diseases, revealed an oil which proved 30% more effective at killing trypanosome parasites than did diminazene aceturate, the standard anti-trypanosomal drug.For many researchers, that would have been the cue for a trip to the patent office and negotiations with a drug company about further rounds of testing.But for Dr Osei-Safo the point is not to make a refined pharmaceutical, but rather to direct those who are ill towards the best treatments available from herbalists.
