A plant that is found in China is being used by it’s gov­ern­ment in diplo­macy with the African con­ti­nent. A worm­wood shrub that is preva­lent in Asia con­tains artemisinin, one of the drugs used to fight malaria. The Chi­nese gov­ern­ment ships artemisinin to coun­tries that it has diplo­matic rela­tion­ships with. How­ever, the Chi­nese are reluc­tant to teach Africans how to grow the shrub on their own.

From Reuters, reporter Tan Ee Lyn explains how this health issue becomes inter­na­tional diplo­macy instead.

China hopes to improve and use the drug as a uniquely Chi­nese weapon to fight malaria not on its own soil, where the deadly dis­ease has been sharply pruned back, but in Africa, where it still kills one child every 30 seconds.

Already, a Chinese-backed erad­i­ca­tion pro­gramme on a small island off Africa has proven a huge success.

Away from its prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion, sci­en­tists back in the lab in Guangzhou are also achiev­ing results. In one of the lab’s refrig­er­a­tors sit a dozen tri­an­gu­lar test-tubes hold­ing seedlings of the sweet worm­wood shrub, also called Artemisia annua, which has only been found in the wild in China, Viet­nam and bor­der areas in Myanmar.

“There are about 0.6 parts of artemisinin in every 100 parts of the plant in the wild, but we have man­aged to increase the artemisinin con­tent to between 1.2 and 1.8,” said Feng Lil­ing, assis­tant pro­fes­sor at the Trop­i­cal Med­i­cine Insti­tute in Guangzhou Uni­ver­sity of Tra­di­tional Chi­nese Medicine.

China pledged to help Africa fight malaria at the tri­en­nial Forum on China and Africa Coop­er­a­tion (FOCAC) in 2006 and has since set up 30 anti-malaria and pre­ven­tion units. The next FOCAC meet­ing is in Egypt on Novem­ber 8–9.

Help­ing devel­op­ing coun­tries erad­i­cate malaria will help China project its influ­ence and pres­tige as a global power, said pol­i­tics pro­fes­sor Joseph Cheng at City Uni­ver­sity in Hong Kong.
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Tan­za­nia, Kenya and Nige­ria have begun farm­ing hybrids of the sweet worm­wood shrub with Chi­nese and Viet­namese ances­try, said Li Guo­qiao at the Trop­i­cal Med­i­cine Institute.

“I inspected the plan­ta­tions and the plants are grow­ing well,” Li told Reuters in an interview.

Asked if China would export the high-yielding Artemisia annua to Africa, Li said: “We want to grow them in China and what­ever we export depends on bilat­eral relationships.”