National Geographic HD Blog: National Geographic News

Tuesday 20 March 2012

National Geographic News

National Geographic News Biography
When Grace Gobbo walks through a Tanzanian rain forest, she doesn't see only trees, flowers, and vines. She sees cures.
For centuries, medicinal plants used by traditional healers have been at the heart of effective health care in this verdant African nation. With expensive imported pharmaceuticals unaffordable for most of the population, holistic cures often provide the only relief for illness. But today, both the lush landscape and indigenous medical knowledge are disappearing. Gobbo hopes her efforts to preserve natural remedies and native habitat will help reverse the trend.
Gobbo works as an ethnobotanist with the Jane Goodall Institute's Greater Gombe Ecosystems Program, but her specific interest in medicinal plants bloomed late. Growing up in a Christian family with a doctor for a father, Gobbo dismissed traditional healing as witchcraft. Then coursework in botany exposed her to evidence she couldn't ignore. "We studied cases where a particular plant successfully treated coughs," she recalls. "Laboratory results proved it stopped bacterial infection."
Intrigued, Gobbo began interviewing traditional healers in her own area who described their success using plants to treat a wide range of ailments, including skin and chest infections, stomach ulcers, diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, and even cancer. To date, she has recorded information shared by more than 80 healers, entering notes and photographs about plants and their uses into a computer database.

National Geographic News