Читать книгу Recent Advances in Polyphenol Research - Группа авторов - Страница 52

In Botswana, the population at large, both in rural areas and in towns, subscribes to a mixture of traditional medicine and Western medicine. To the chagrin of traditional healers, however, the traditional practices are slowly falling out of fashion, and are not regarded in as high esteem as Western medicine, especially among younger citizens. In an attempt to bridge this gap, a series of mobile discovery workshops was conducted in two regions of the country for traditional healers and other community members, who were invited to provide their own indigenous medicinal plants for use in the bioassay screens (Andrae‐Marobela et al. 2012). The mobile biodiscovery approach was used to establish an indigenous knowledge‐guided drug‐discovery platform. Because opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections are relatively high in Botswana, mobile screens were specifically tailored to include pathogenic bacterial strains with high potential to detect promising new drug candidates (Andrae‐Marobela et al. 2012). The ethnomedical approaches (workshops) were conducted in hot spots of biodiversity as well as ethnic diversity. The bioassays revealed “first hits” of bioactivity to medicinal plants that had previously never been examined using these tools, and provided a way to conserve traditional knowledge in qualitative and semiquantitative data formats. One of the most appreciated features of this approach was that the indigenous healers were true research partners given all rights to transparency and benefits, and were never undermined as informant sources only.