Bitter Pills:Medicines & The Third World Poor | Page 162

ingredient extracted from dioscorea, a plant that grows wild in many parts of Asia.
Two major American manufacturers, Searle and Wyeth, now have factories in
Southern India and Kashmir to produce the chemical intermediates from dioscorea.
These are then exported to the US and Europe to be processed into the actual
contraceptive pills, some of which will end up back on the Indian market. (:i)
Other examples of plants growing in developing countries that are processed into
modern drugs include vinca rosea (rose periwinkle) the source of the modern drug
vincristine, used to treat acute leukaemia.
Portulaca oleracea
another
traditional medicinal plant that grows wild in the Philippines, where it is known
as gualisman, contains the active ingredients of the modern drugs noradrenaline
(for low blood pressure) and dopamine (for treating heart failure). (22) The
continuing importance of plant sources to the modern drug industry is stressed
by an Indian analyst who comments: "Today more than half the prescriptions
written by American physicians are estimated to contain a plant-derived drug a drug that has either been extracted from a plant, or one that has been synthesised
to duplicate (or improve on) a plant
substance." |231

FACTORY-PRODUCED HERBAL MEDICINES
A growing number of developing countries are now keen to exploit the potential
of natural plant resources. Amongst them, Tanzania, Nigeria and Burma all have
national programmes to build up plant-based drug production, already successfully
established in China and Vietnam.
In some countries private manufacturers have launched into the commercial
production of herbal medicines, free from the controls imposed on manufacturers
of allopathic drugs. In Bangladesh, for example, traditional Ayurvedic, Unani
and homeopathic drugs are all exempt from any controls under existing drug
legislation. (24) The lack of controls can seriously endanger health, as the
President of the British Pharmaceutical Society has recently warned. He cited
the fact that "tests on medicines imported into Singapore ... showed that 38 out
of 140 samples were contaminated with dangerous amounts of toxic metals - one
sample contained 20,000 times the permissible level of mercury and several had
1,000 times that of arsenic". |25) Some officials responsible for drug control have
recognised that, in the words of the then Bangladesh Director of Drug
Administration, "the precautions observed in the manufacture and distribution
of traditional medicinal products should be, as far as possible, similar to those
followed for modern allopathic drugs". (26)
Because the potential hazards are great, it has been argued that traditional
medicines should be put through the same elaborate clinical pharmacological trials
and processing as modern drugs. (27) Partly in response, new research institutes
are planned for a number of Third World capitals, including Dacca, where the
Bangladesh Government has allocated over £4 million for a such an institute.
Research scientists are keen to establish the efficacy of local medicinal plants by
extracting their 'active principle' or 'pure compound'. Technical back-up has been
122