Folk remedy zaps Ebola in lab test.A compound from the fruit of the bitter kola kola: see cola. , a West African West Africa A region of western Africa between the Sahara Desert and the Gulf of Guinea. It was largely controlled by colonial powers until the 20th century. West African adj. & n. tree that healers have used for centuries to treat other diseases, stopped the Ebola virus Ebola virus (ēbō`lə), a member of a family (Filovirus) of viruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers. The virus, named for the region in Congo (Kinshasa) where it was first identified in 1976, emerged from the rain forest, where it survives in from replicating in a laboratory test. "The same forest that yields the dreaded Ebola virus could be the source of a cure," says Maurice Iwu, a descendant of a family of Nigerian healers who has trained in Western pharmacy. Iwu founded the Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme, with offices in Silver Spring, Md., which spearheads the investigation of compounds from the Garcinia kola Garcinia kola is a species of flowering plant in the Clusiaceae family. It is found in Benin, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests. . The National Institutes of Health has funded the identification of 46 potentially medicinal compounds from the tree. Some of these chemicals have quashed strains of flu virus in laboratory tests. The Ebola virus, infamous as the fast-spreading epidemic in the movie Outbreak, first attracted the notice of Western doctors during a gruesome grue·some adj. Causing horror and repugnance; frightful and shocking: a gruesome murder. See Synonyms at ghastly. epidemic in Zaire in 1976. The virus kills by causing massive hemorrhaging from a wide range of organs. Neither Western nor African healers have a cure yet, and in some outbreaks 80 percent of the victims have died. |
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