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Saving What Remains MEDICINAL DRUGS (continued) The rainforest may someday provide the cure for AIDS, pancreatic cancer, antibiotic-resistant staph infection, lassa fever, or alzheimer's disease if given the chance to do so. Unfortunately as forest cover is diminished by 1-2% every year, it is projected that 20-25% of the world's plant species will be extinct by the year 2015. Perhaps in some remote Andean valley today, slated for destruction today, lives a rare orchid which has developed an anti-viral chemical that kills HIV, halts cancer, or slows aging. In addition, the shamans who provide much of the insight into identifying these plants and their uses, are disappearing at an even faster rate as their villages seek a more Western lifestyle. These shamans are generally elders and when they die, their unique knowledge of traditional uses of rainforest plants die with them. Some organizations are trying to prevent the loss of medicinal knowledge when indigenous elders die. The Terra Nova Rainforest reserve is the first ethnomedicinal forest reserve designed to insure medicinal plants will be available for local use. The Reserve encourages the use of such plants and has also implemented a program teaching youths about uses of medicinal plants so this knowledge will not die, but be passed on to future generations and researchers. National botanical gardens, like those of Missouri and New York, are playing an important role in propagating medicinal plants that are either threatened in the wild or so rare that collection can not satisfy demand. Several gardens have propagated such medicinal plants and freely distributed seedlings and to peasants who can integrate them into their traditional food crops. The plants can provide substantially more cash than many traditional crops like bananas, coffee, and cocoa. Animals also provide compounds useful to humans as medicinal drugs. Both leeches and vampire bats have powerful anticoagulants they use in feeding on their prey. From the saliva of the leech comes hirudin which is now used to dissolve blood clots in humans. The vampire bat has a salival substance that can be used to prevent heart attacks. The slimly secretions of frogs is be used to treat infections and mental disorders, while scientists hope that one day blood from the ubiquitous (in the western US) Western Fence lizard (more popularly known as the "blue-belly") will help prevent or cure Lyme disease. ABT-594 is an experimental painkiller derived from the skin secretions of Epipedobates tricolor, a colorful poison arrow frog. PESTICIDES Plants have been synthesizing chemicals for millions of years to protect them from predation by insects and infection from disease. Thus rainforest plants have developed a complete array of natural pesticides. These pesticides can be isolated and some can be synthesized in the laboratory by pharmaceutical companies. These natural pesticides are effective for protecting cultivated crops from destruction by pests and disease, without the adverse effects of chemical pesticides like DDT. Increasingly studies show that using natural predators like wasps and flies with limited use of pesticides is more effective in eradicating pets in the tropics than regular spraying with synthetic pesticides. In addition to protecting crops from infestation, many rainforest plants can be used as insect repellent. The roots of the liana, philodendron, from American rainforests has an odor that keeps away mosquitoes. The bright orange berries of another New World plant, Bixa orellana, are effective in deterring biting insects in addition to being used as a body paint and dye. These compounds can be further studied and analyzed by pharmaceutical companies, and once the effective molecules are isolated, they can be used to create new insect repellents that might by less detrimental to the skin than conventionally used DEET (which incidently, is an excellent solvent of plastics and expensive camera equipment). These highly effective insect repellent are more ecologically sound and inexpensive to produce.
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