New interest in old ways of healing

Representatives of the western scientific community and African traditional healers have agreed to collaborate on the use and value of herbal treatments, including for opportunistic infections associated with HIV/AIDS. The western health institutes and World Bank also agreed to discuss ways in which to build partnerships between traditional health practitioners and the scientific community, after a seminar in the US last week in which Tanzanian and Kenyan groups demonstrated their approaches to health care based on indigenous knowledge.

The Tanga AIDS Working Group (TAWG), operating in and around the northeastern port town, has treated over 2,000 AIDS patients with herbs prescribed by traditional healers. The impact of TAWG had been most significant in alleviating some opportunistic infections caused by HIV/AIDS; some patients treated using indigenous knowledge have lived longer by up to five years, according to a press statement from the World Bank’s Indigenous Knowledge for Development (IK) Programme.

In Kenya, the Centre for Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Agricultural By-Products (CIKSAP) was sponsoring an exchange between a Maasai community in the Ngong Hills [24 km southwest of the capital, Nairobi] Maasai herders and Luo farmers in the west of the country on the development and marketing of indigenous medicinal and food products. The IK programme had also recorded how health workers in Iganga District, southeastern Uganda, had used indigenous knowledge systems to help reduce maternal mortality rates by 50 percent within three years, according to the World Bank statement. [for further details, see separate IRIN story of 21 May headlined “EAST AFRICA: Tapping into traditional health practices”]