seattletimes.com
Health & Science
Posted at 06:02 a.m. PDT; Wednesday, July 22, 1998
African healers hold secrets to new scourges
by Matthew Bunce
Reuters
YAMOUSSOUKRO, Ivory Coast - African healers, once scorned by physicians and scientists, have valuable weapons for the fight against emerging diseases, but many may stay secret because of religion and suspicion.
Experts say village doctors' cures for mysterious tropical diseases have already proved useful even though enduring scourges such as malaria, yellow fever, river blindness and leprosy continue to ravage the world's poorest continent.
European missionary workers such as Nosella Domitalla, with 22 years of treating the sick in West Africa, says traditional cures have long been sidelined, often for good reasons.
"There is no collaboration with outsiders, so traditional medicine has been put aside," she said at a conference held near her Ivory Coast mission on the emerging African mycobacterial disease known to scientists as Buruli ulcerans.
Experts at the world's first international conference on the disease this month saw a role for traditional healers in treating the leprosylike disease, a cousin of tuberculosis, which this year was placed on the World Health Organization's list of emerging dangers to public health.
"We have to collaborate with traditional doctors," said Francine Portaels, director of mycobacteriology at Belgium's Institute of Tropical Medicine.
"You meet people in villages who have been well-treated, so we cannot sweep aside the efficiencies of traditional medicine if it is all many people have."
Buruli, a virulent African cousin of the flesh-eating bacterium that has surfaced in Western hospitals in the 1990s, is the third-most-significant mycobacterial disease in humans with normal immunity, trailing only leprosy and tuberculosis.
While the number of reported cases in West Africa and elsewhere has soared since 1978 - with 10,000 cases reported by 1997 in Ivory Coast alone, compared with half that by 1995 - healers have mostly kept whatever secrets they hold.
"If something is a secret, they do not give it away," said Augustin Guedenou, Benin's coordinator in the fight against leprosy and Buruli. "Healers know the plants, but they have not given us that information. It could be useful."
Traditional healers have been good at treating localized Buruli ulcer infections, but not gaping wounds, he says.
Workers at Benin's Catholic mission of Zagnanado in contact with the Holi tribe at Houedja recall a 50-year-old practitioner who claimed she inherited "the gift" of treating ulcers from ancestors from Nigeria. She accurately described symptoms and progress of the disease, but her treatments remain a secret.
"The recognition of an environmental source of this agent is consistent with the popular concepts of medical scientists," Guedenou said.
Popular local belief says victims contract Buruli through contact with soil or objects touched by another person's lesions. Another belief attributes it to thefts in a garden protected by fetishes.
Buruli eats into skin and bones by destroying blood vessels with toxins, exposing large areas of gangrenous flesh. Surgical excision of ulcers and dead flesh can leave much of the body stripped back to the muscle.
Portaels says those who are saved by healers are often grotesquely deformed by a lack of physiotherapy and huge areas of scarring, leaving them unable to work.