There is more news from Cameroon: the plant Vernonia guineensis grows there. The local people use it for their traditional medicine for all sorts of things, including getting rid of infections of worms or bacteria. This is interesting because these pathogens are becoming resistant to more and more of the Western drugs that are used to control them. If this little plant is effective - and not too toxic -, we might be able to do something with it.
An international team of researchers, including Leiden pharmacologist Rob Verpoorte, set to work on V. guineensis. They made various preparations from the plant and applied it to different moulds, bacteria and worms. To estimate its toxicity, they injected some rats with different concentrations of the rhizome extract and presented their results in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, of which Verpoorte is the editor-in-chief.
The rats were not very greatly affected by the plant’s toxicity, but unfortunately the same applies to bacteria: the plant’s effectiveness against microbes is only mild. However, it is very effective against the roundworm Trichuris muris, which good news for mice because they are susceptible to the worm. Whether it also works if the worms are actually in mouse is not yet clear, just as it is not known whether it is effective against a related species, Trichuris trichuria, which infects human