The Ebola outbreak particularly in the country propped up the issue of bitter kola as a possible cure for the deadly disease. The issue did not just come up, it stemmed from a research undertaken by former chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Maurice Iwu. In this interview on AIT, Iwu, a professor of pharmacognosy and a member of the Ebola Research Committee set up by the federal government, talks on the efficacy of bitter kola. WINIFRED OGBEBO monitored the discussion and brings you the excerpt.
How did your findings on bitter kola come about?
The US army had a fantastic programme on the development of drugs for Ebola; hemorrhagic fevers- Lassa fever, Mapux fever virus and others. It was not just Ebola. My approach has been to be able to live in the environment with human … As long as we live on this planet, there’s going to be diseases that we’ve never had because as we encroach into this environment, we are going to come across diseases that are killing us, but not actually able to kill us because we are part of the environmental system. So that has been our approach in looking at the cutting edge. It’s a difficult task. It’s like hunting out there. So this was in 1999.
On the issue of bitter kola, as a member of the Ebola Research Committee, tell us about that.
Actually we have a procedure. We see the Minister of Health as our doctor. It’s his decision to decide what we should take or what we shouldn’t take. The health of the nation is his priority. So we have a reporting sequence where things are not really as hopeless as people are thinking. We report to him and he makes public what he chooses to make. He is a doctor. He’s a professor of medicine. So he is the one that should tell me, Prof Iwu for your health sake, don’t take this and I would have to believe him.
Is there any progress in getting out of the testing stage?
Yes we’ve gone through the test tube stage for other indications of bitter kola. I don’t know if you ever had a common cold and taken bitter kola? It resolved the common cold faster because of its anti-viral properties. But the use of gestinal kola (this is what we call it in medicine) is not just because of its anti- viral properties. There are two ways to attack a virus; either you go head-on about its reputation and so on, which we call anti- viral; the other aspect is to look at the body’s own immune system, things that will act as defence mechanism, things that will make you to be stronger. If you check history, most people recover. It’s not true that Ebola kills everybody that has it. Looking at Kiqueep study again, it’s about 60 percent death, but some people recover and then you now start asking, those whose immune system are stronger tend to be able to survive it.
America has ZMapp and Serup experimental drugs but what is the problem with Nigeria when we know that these diseases are out there and we do have the capacity to research but we don’t?
That’s the problem. There is a missing link out there because what is happening here is that the ZMapp, I am very familiar with it because I worked in the US military research centre for 10 years, the company that has made it has been funded heavily by the American government for years and they have not made a profit. We have, for example, a private science laboratory at Nsukka and for the past 25 years and we’re lucky to get partners from our group. First, the ZMapp medicine has never been tested before and it’s even speculative. The fact that those people got cured does not necessarily mean from scientific point of view that they got cured by ZMapp because from a scientific point of view, it is not possible to do what we call Phase 3 trial on Ebola drugs because there are not enough candidates to make it statistically valid.
The fact that you have those two Americans that were cured, from my own point of view, they are anecdotal. There was even one Spanish missionary that died despite being administered the ZMapp. But there has to be a national consciousness. Given things like solving the issue of the unemployed, why can’t we train young people on how to add value to such simple things? Google African bush mango, it is the number one selling drug for obesity globally; that is our ogbono. Most researches are that simplistic and that is what makes them unbelievable.
How soon can we expect results from the bitter kola research going on?
We are going very fast. In my own research group since it happened, we activated some networks that have been dormant. Bitter kola’s scientific viral property was again published in 2000. In 2000, I challenged the West in their own journal called the Lancet; every medical doctor sees it as the ultimate journal.
The idea is very simple. If you are being attacked by an armed robber, let’s take the virus as an armed robber, the first defence is to go and acquire more weapons than the armed robber. But you don’t know how many weapons the robbers have; they can even call others to join them to fight you.
But if you fortify your house, the chances are that you will survive the attack.
So we are taking a different approach to medicine. It’s not popular yet but in a situation where you are now talking about healing rather than cure treatment, that is a whole ball game. Diabetes has the same problem. Obesity has the same problem.
The WHO has now accepted that obesity itself is a disease. It’s not that you are fat and you are ill; no, fatness itself is an illness. This is another concept of it. We did that in 2000. The point I am making is that why other people bother about the nuances of now, some people have to be in the frontier science thinking about tomorrow. If we eat well, exercise, adopt good lifestyle, half of the diseases will go away.
Source: Leadership
