TEXTO
Mum Knows Best: Homemade Soup May Fight Malaria
PARIS — Some soups may be good for more
than just the soul.
A new study suggests that certain homemade
broths — made from chicken, beef or even just
[5] vegetables — might have properties that can help fight
malaria.
Researcher Jake Baum of Imperial College
London asked children from diverse cultural
backgrounds at state-funded Eden Primary School
[10] to bring in homemade clear soup broth from recipes
that had been passed down across generations to
treat fever.
The samples were filtered and incubated with
cultures of Plasmodium falciparum, a parasite that
[15] accounts for an estimated 99.7% of malaria cases
in Africa, according to the World Health Organization
(WHO).
Of 56 soup samples tested, five were more than
50% effective in curbing growth of the parasite, two
[20] with similar success as one drug currently used to
treat malaria, Baum and his team reported Tuesday
in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Four other soups were more than 50% effective
at blocking parasites from maturing to be able to infect
[25] mosquitoes, which transmit the disease.
"When we started getting soups that worked —
in the lab under very restricted conditions, I should
add — we were really happy and excited," Baum told
AFP in an email.
[30] But he noted that it was unclear which ingredients
had the antimalarial properties.
"If we were serious about going back and finding
the magic ingredient, like good scientists, we'd have
to do it in a very standardized way," he said.
[35] The soups came from families from diverse ethnic
backgrounds, including Europe, North Africa and the
Middle East, and had a variety of base ingredients,
including chicken, beef, beetroot and cabbage.
Much to the pleasure of the vegetarians involved
[40] in the study, Baum noted, the veggie-only soups
showed similar results to the meat-based ones.
Baum said he had wanted to teach children the
process through which scientific research can turn an
herbal remedy into a synthetically produced medicine.
[45] He pointed to the success of Professor Dr. Tu
Youyou of China, who in the 1970s was instrumental
in isolating and extracting an antimalarial substance
from quinhao, an herb used in Eastern medicine to
treat fever for some two thousand years.
[50] This research led to the synthetic production of
artemisinin — a drug now widely used to treat malaria
— and won Tu the Nobel Prize in 2015.
Emerging resistance to drugs treating the disease
— which kills some 400,000 people a year — means
[55] scientists have to "look beyond the chemistry shelf for
new drugs,” Baum noted in a press release.
"The lesson from me was more that there may
well be golden recipes out there in the world for
disease that remain untapped."
In "If we were serious about going back and finding the magic ingredient, like good scientists, we'd have to do it in a very standardized way" (l. 32-33), "it" is related to
