Lewis and his team lived among the tribe, collecting plant samples and learning about specific plants the Indians use in herbal medicinal practices. The results just surprised us. Lewis presented his research at the 14th Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Botany, held this summer at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Results of the analyses will be published in the forthcoming issue of Pharmaceutical Biology. The research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Tuberculosis remains a serious health problem in the United States and worldwide.
Additionally, the WHO estimates that one-third of the world's population is infected with M. tuberculosis. It has made a comeback, but 46 percent of our samples with TB inhibition is an incredibly encouraging result so early in the research. The development of certain drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis combined with the spread of the HIV virus can account for the recent comeback of this deadly disease. Fortunately, the exposure of TB in the remote parts of the Upper Amazon has been minimal, and the native tribes, including the Aguaruna, have little experience with the disease, making the discovery of the inhibitory plant samples even more significant. The Aguaruna, a tribe of the Jivaro Indians of the Upper Amazon Basin, still rely largely on memorization and oral transmission of their knowledge of medicinal plants to survive.