Who said a layman cannot make intelligent contributions to a highly technical field? There are times when all one needs is to engage the logical thinking gear of their brain to follow and participate in some technical argument. Allow me to engage my logical gear in the field of medicine.

There is a newspaper article that reaffirms Malawi’s dream of setting up a plant for producing anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs). This is a good move that engaged what I would rather call, ‘a normally inactive gear’ in me. I recall reading an article on Moringa Oliefera, a locally available herbal plant that is said to help raise the CD4 count of HIV/AIDS patients.

My understanding of ARVs from a chat I had with a medical practitioner a while ago is that ARVs’ major function is to lock the CD4 cells (the cells that are responsible for immunity in your blood system). These are the cells that the HIV/AIDS virus’ targets for destruction and when they are locked, the virus does not attack them any longer. If one starts taking ARVs with a CD4 count of 200, it means those are the remaining health cells per milligram of one’s blood that are responsible for defending their body against diseases. Locking those cells means the HIV virus will not be able to attack them and that one’s CD4 count will remain at 200 and not go up. By weighing these two arguments, assuming the Moringa argument is true, my logic automatically tells me that Moringa is a great wonder of nature that the government and all of us cannot afford to ignore any longer. If you are a medical practitioner and you are reading this article and are challenging the authenticity of the Moringa claim, who else, other than you, can prove that authenticity on such a highly edible plant as Moringa? Then there is the issue of what goes into the production of ARVs versus Moringa. I believe ARVs are a concoction of synthetic chemicals with adverse side effects while Moringa is an edible plant that in the rural areas is used as relish which doesn’t have any known side effects on the consumers. In that aspect, logic presents Moringa as better than ARVs. Other than its use in HIV/AIDS patients, the plant, known as a wonder or miracle plant internationally, has numerous other important uses. Without belabouring the argument on Moringa, Malawi is sitting on a number of plants and herbs with internationally recognised medicinal properties such as neem, colombo roots (commonly found in Mangochi and used for the production of malarial drugs) and a number of others that are earning some individuals export markets and are probably re-imported into Malawi as finished products. We are known to import drugs from Tanzania, some made from the same plants that we export as their ingredients. What is wrong with us a nation? For over a very long period of time what I have seen are just rebuttals, in the press, to claims made by opportunistic herbalists but not initiatives by a group of doctors and scientists to carry out tests to prove or disprove these claims. I believe it is high time government takes initiative and help individuals orP a group of business persons to venture into pharmaceutical businesses that will produce products from such plants as others have done. Are we saying that our learned doctors also subscribe to the archaic thinking that synthetic chemicals are better than our natural herbs so long as the synthetics come from the western world or that a concoction of the herbs is good as long as it comes from outside our boarders? I believe Malawi is a nation of highly intelligent and hard working professionals that excel and are on high demand outside our borders. I also believe that there is a disease that needs to be cured amidst us that causes those professionals who are effective elsewhere, not to be as effective when they are working within the borders of the nation. It is my appeal to the policy makers, starting with the first citizen, to start encouraging such scientific experiments by our professionals as I am sure that would present an exciting and motivating challenge to them. It would to me if I were in their shoes