Scientists Go to the Bush to Find TB Cures
Aug. 24 -- Walter H. Lewis admits he’s surprised himself at the astonishing discovery he and his colleagues made in the Upper Amazon region of the Peruvian rain forest.
For a couple of decades, Lewis has studied Indians who inhabit that lush region because of their legendary use of local plants to fight off diseases.
In recent years Lewis, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, has focused his research more and more on tuberculosis, which kills about 2 million people a year around the world and has become increasingly resistant to pharmaceutical drugs.
And as one who has developed a profound respect for the medicinal cures of the Aguaruna Indians, Lewis began to wonder if those folks might have a cure for TB.
At first blush, that doesn’t make much sense. Except for rare occurrences, the relatively isolated Indians of the Upper Amazon don’t have a significant problem with TB, so they have no need to find plants that would fight a disease they rarely see. Virtually all of their tribal cures are targeted for specific diseases.
But still, Lewis couldn’t help but wonder. These were the people, after all, who are believed to have been the first to find that quinine bark could help fight off the ravages of malaria. And the poison darts they used for hunting yielded a drug that proved extremely valuable as a muscle relaxant.
Today, “it is probably used in every major surgery,” Lewis says.
Memory Elvin-Lewis, his wife and partner, who is also a professor of biology at Washington University, was equally impressed by the accomplishments of the Aguaruna. Years earlier, while she was a professor in the university’s dental school, she became fascinated by the fact that the Indians had black teeth.
During their many trips to the Upper Amazon, Elvin-Lewis learned why. The Indians chewed on leaves and the fruit of a plant that turned their teeth black. But it also did something else. It sealed the enamel of their teeth and prevented decay, and it coated their teeth with fluoride centuries before modern toothpaste brought that preventive medicine to the rest of us.
