Coronavirus: Health Ministry submits over 30 herbal medicines for testing
The Ministry of Health has submitted 33 herbal medicines to the Centre for Plant Medicine Research for testing as potential cure or vaccine for the novel corona virus.
The herbal medicines are products from the Ghana Federation of Traditional Healers.
The Deputy Director for the Centre for Plant Medicine Research, Dr Alfred Ampomah Appiah, said aside the 33 received from the ministry of health, his office continues to receive more herbal medicines for testing.
“On a daily basis, we continue to receive more herbal medicines from individuals. As as it stands now, we have over 60 individuals still submitting samples for testing,” JoyNews reported.
He further explained that that centre was testing the drugs to ascertain if the submitted drugs had certain antiviral properties to the novel coronavirus.
Mr. Ampomah added they were retesting other medicines used in treating viral infections to ascertain if it will be useful in the fight against the corona virus.
“What is being done globally is to test certain medicines that have already been selected to have certain antiviral properties and the prospects of those drugs are being monitored to test its effectiveness to the novel virus,”
“So, what we are doing now is to look at the range, pick a few of them and re-test for antiviral properties. What we are interested in is a herb that has the potential to do something so far as coronavirus is concerned. So, we are experimenting with these other properties to find out if that’s plausible,” he stated.
