A Kenyan doctor uses herbs to treat malaria:
“he 57-year-old Maseno University organic chemistry lecturer cultivates Artemisia annua – a plant with strong plasmodial clearance power – and teaches postgraduate students how to do research on local plants with traditional medicinal therapy.
Jondiko, Dholuo for a writer(s), pays a lot of tribute to the late Prof Thomas Odhiambo. The two met when Jondiko had made a scientific breakthrough in a research on pyrethrum insecticides at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (Icipe).
When Odhiambo learnt that Jondiko was the graduate researcher who had developed a chromatographic method for separation of six pyrethrin compounds from pyrethrum extracts, he offered him a PhD scholarship at Nottingham University to study organic chemistry. During his PhD studies he developed a new method of making synthetic pyrethrins.
Jondiko now grows at Maseno University the medicinal plant the Chinese are believed to have used 2000 years ago to treat malaria. The university has provided land to the scholar to grow and process the drug to fight the mosquito plasmodia and discount the World Health Organisation’s belief that it might develop resistance in the near future.”
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