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Comment by begueradj | Hacker News Reader

China had been, until recently, for decades, the most populated country in the world. Still Chinese people don't have a problem called malaria. Why ?

Because they use a plant to prevent and heal it. I can't recall the name of this plant but I remember I saw a documentary stating that China tried multiple times to export that plant to the world but Bill Gates, who is interested in the subject and wanted to develop a vaccine for malaria, for a long time convinced the world health organization to not allow that on the name that the plant has health risks, inefficient and is dangerous to the environment.

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The Chinese medicinal herb you're thinking about is sweet wormwood, from which we isolated artemisinin. Artemisinin isn't a suppressed secret. It's one of the major treatments for malaria and it netted its discoverer a Nobel prize.

The drug the article is talking about contains artemisinin in combination with another substance.

We know how to deal with malaria, so this isn't some story of Big Pharma hiding the truth. The disease used to be endemic in the US and in Europe. Better treatments save lives, but eradication hinges on economic and political factors... which are in turn not helped by malaria.

> "We know how to deal with malaria, so this isn't some story of Big Pharma hiding the truth. The disease used to be endemic in the US and in Europe"

Malaria is still a public health concern in Africa. And that's where Bill Gates does not want to see that plant exported to Africa because, unlike the Big Pharma products, it is a cheap solution.

I do not think we are talking about the same plant because "sweet wormwood" exists in Africa (a variant of it). Unfortunately I can't find the documentary I saw some years ago about this. It was done by few French investigation journalists.

Having lived in several African countries and studied Sino-African relations I can say with certainty, that both Chinese and Africans couldn’t give less of a shit about what Bill Gates wants if there is a product that Chinese people want to sell and Africans want to buy.

No, that's not how trade functions. You can't sell what you want, where you want.

Trade is subject to lobbyism (to say the least)

Sure, but the US or US-based businessmen are hardly the only actors lobbying and if you look at the trade balances of basically all African countries, Chinese interests are far more successful in exploiting African markets than US concerns. Add to this that several African countries have basically no diplomatic relationship and/or are openly hostile to the US and it makes no sense at all that they would forego a cheap and self-sufficient remedy to malaria (if it existed), just to please big Pharma.

TFA is literally about a wormwood related drug being used to treat babies in africa.

It's a traditional medicine for malaria, and the reason china wasn't exporting it was due to the military importance of anti-malaria medicine. This was a thing before Bill Gates was rich or powerful. Since then, I'm not really aware of any suppression of the drug. The only anti-malaria treatment which has been suppressed by US interests is the vaccine, because they didn't believe it was profitable. Now that it is profitable, they're going forward with it.

Now that the white wormwood based treatment is known worldwide, there are questions about whether it should be kept in reserve like quinine. I'm not sure if things have changed, but I recall an approach is to give Artemisinin alongside another treatment, to prevent malaria from adapting. In africa, people will commonly listen to the doctor's instruction to take the whole course of medicine and will ignore it and just take half. They give the other half to a relative. This causes treatment resistant malaria to develop.

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