How indigenous people use medicinal plants to alleviate coronavirus symptoms

Blanca Bonilla was given all that medicinal plants by her mother, Dolores, who worked all her life with the natural pharmacy she had in La Calera, an indigenous community embedded in the Ecuadorian Andes.

Blanca was the last of nine siblings and she remembers that since she can remember, she has helped her mother.

“He would put a little hat on me and give me a basket and a knife so that I could go and collect the medicinal plants," he recalls. "He explained to me that they were in the dry areas, in the forests, in the ditches, in sandy lands or next to the trees;

each one had a place and for me the things she told me were like a story ”.

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This 42-year-old woman, who after the death of her mother took up the job of healing with plants, used her knowledge to face the new coronavirus.

Together with other women from her community, she descended to the ravines, on walks of up to two hours, to collect rue, altamisa or marco, uchugihua or chili plant, and ashnagihua (the Quichua name of a native plant).

With these plants, the elders of La Caleta fought a similar evil, they say, in the past.

"They knew him as the donkey's cough and it also killed them," recalls Blanca.

The collected plants were crushed on a stone and then mixed with boiled water to prepare disinfectants.

"100 liters of water were boiled, but it had to be cold before mixing it with the yerbitas, we didn't cook them," explains this expert on Andean plants.

With this preparation, they sprayed the exteriors of houses and roads during the quarantine.

But when the first infected appeared, it was necessary to prepare palliatives to alleviate the symptoms of covid-19.

Blanca and her neighbors returned to look for the medicine in the bushes of their community.

One of the most collected was verbena, which, taken as an infusion, serves as a decongestant and lowers fever.

Blanca, who also relies on apitherapy, applied propolis, pollen and bee venom to patients who developed more complex respiratory symptoms.

"I did have worrying cases and it was difficult to treat them, but we had no losses."

The fight against the coronavirus with natural plants in La Caleta was made known thanks to information from the Iluman community radio, which visited several indigenous communities during the pandemic.

The journalist Alberto Segovia comments that, in the countryside, everyone prefers to heal themselves at home, with the plants, rather than going to hospitals.

In their experience, they do better.

"In the city people are dying, in the countryside there is less death."

The community journalist says that in another Andean area called La Unión, the midwives met to create a remedy against the coronavirus with about 40 plants, but they did not reveal a single component of the concoction.

In general, there is a lot of suspicion in the communities to talk about their ancestral knowledge.

Omar Vacas Cruz, ethnobotanist and independent researcher, has been developing an inventory of the curative botany that exists in Ecuador for two decades.

According to his calculations, there are more than 3,200 medicinal plants in the country (this is 12% of the medicinal plants documented by Kew Gardens, one of the most prestigious botanical institutions in London).

This researcher is convinced of the healing effect of some plants and, although almost all their benefits are described in the world pharmacopoeia, he wants to continue documenting the different uses that indigenous people give them.

"Medicinal plants have a huge compendium of active principles, this makes them work for different cases, some still unknown.

It is lifelong learning ”, he asserts.

He also wants the catalogs that he has been publishing to promote scientific research in Ecuador.

"I have seen that plants have an almost miraculous healing effect, but there is not enough scientific evidence," he says.

Cat's claw, a climbing liana native to Peru and Ecuador, is one of that group of plants that the ethnobotanist describes as almost miraculous.

This is used in the treatment of asthma, gastric ulcer, diabetes and viral processes.

In the tours that this researcher has made during the pandemic, he has seen that while in the cities the symptoms of covid-19 were alleviated with paracetamol and other medications, in the indigenous communities they used various plants.

He mentions the same verbena that Blanca recommends to her neighbors to reduce fever in La Caleta, but also the tobacco that some indigenous people use in the Amazon to make aspirations and have more energy or improve the immune system;

the eucalyptus that works as a decongestant;

chuquiragua, which is anti-inflammatory, and dulcamaras, which have extraordinary antiviral power.

The latter, whose scientific name is

, is not native, but was introduced in Ecuador and is included in a list of plants with antiviral activity that aspires to be the basis for future clinical trials.

The Ecuadorian researcher participated in the preparation of this compendium of antiviral plants, which was made in several countries and which will soon be published.

“We found approximately 150 plants that could be as adjuvants to some treatment for the coronavirus.

The dulcamaras that are being taken in some Ecuadorian indigenous communities have a proven effect in the treatment of herpes one and herpes two ”.

Vacas Cruz warns of the charlatanism that exists around healing plants and that many times has put some native species in danger of extinction.

During the pandemic there was a hoax around the husk, it is a native tree in the south of the country that was overexploited in the seventeenth century, when quinine, an alkaloid capable of eliminating the parasite that causes malaria, was extracted from its bark.

The husk recovered its validity on social networks and was said to cure covid-19.

Nothing is further from reality.

The ethnobotanist explains that drinks made from the bark of the tree have been used to treat heart problems, night cramps, joint pain, flu and fever, but nothing else, and if taken in the wrong amounts it can be toxic.

That is why he makes a call to attention to the health authority of Ecuador: that there be greater dissemination of the natural pharmacy that the country has.

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