The Immunity Tribe
Are we not all heading in the same direction when it comes to our health?
The selfie diagnosis
Are we not all heading in the same direction when it comes to our health?
We are all dying!
As humans, we are all experiencing the event of ‘living to die’ at different stages. It’s all in the choice we make and the looming outcome of health challenges occurring in our human bodies. As with selfie-diagnosis, we walk by the mirror in our rooms hoping to see what we don’t want to see.
Hanging fat albs; lumps in private parts of the body; red eyes, sneezing, cough and ripe pimples are a manifest alteration to very tiny very parts of the human body. The study of this alteration in compositions is exhausting, most people are not interested in what happens in small places with Latin names in their body.
Most Africans have the innate ability to detect headache or stomach ache. These 'aches' are not strangers to our body. Essentially its means something is out of place or threading a response to attack the body. An attack from bacteria, virus, fungi and a sea of tiny trouble making pathogens has come for our body.
The war of alteration and resistance takes place in the body.
The famous war general said it best.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
An Act of Resistance
A decisive position in war is to defend or attack, running away on the battlefield could mean calling on ‘death while escaping’. The human body chooses the type of war it takes up to either defend or attack. The familiar diseases such as malaria, whooping coughing and cold for those in Africa is a familiar norm, Africans may have grown a baseline resistance to the once deadly disease.
COVID19 pandemic has left a wake of new questions on the gene systems of humans and global resistance development. Continents such as Europe has seen unprecedented death registered opened longer than they hoped for. Governments of Italy, the United Kingdom, France and Germany adopted strategies that saved a few millions of their people. A crossbow strategy in the United States and Nigeria to fight COVID19 meant various State Governors differed from the government at the Federal level.
A colonial strategy adopted by developing countries provided a miscommunication of safeguarding measures among citizens leading to call for a breakaway from the government measures and putting an act of resistance against COVID19 policies.
Every man for himself
On contracting the COVID19. The initial symptoms as discussed by Professor Titus Ibekwe, a medical expert in Garki Hospital, Abuja Nigeria says its ‘Anosmia - the loss of the sense of smell, either total or partial. It may be caused by head injury, infection, or blockage of the nose; with the addition of loss of taste.”
This same attribute is confirmed by Smell tracker. Smell Tracker uses an ‘algorithm that charts smell perception using 5 household items. This may help you notice an early sign of Covid-19’. They asked people to test themselves with household items and report the intensity of the odors from peanut butter, vanilla and toothpaste.
Test and tracing in 40 centres remain the biggest challenge in Nigeria with unreported illness ravaging through many locals in Kano, Kogi and Jigawa State but also disputed by state governors as unconnected with COVID19.
A measure up to the Smell Tracker list above, many Nigerians have attempted to recertify their state of health by resorting Garlic, Lemon Grass tea, Onions, Ginger, Turmeric, spice peppers and Bitter leaf soups. Many of the listed items are expected to help boost the immune system when boiled as herbs.
Herbs, a source of Immunity boosting
The human body battles off innumerable germ attacks every day in every way. As with a densely populated society like Nigeria, the spread of diseases via air, water or contaminated sources is almost inevitable.
The immune system of every man stands best for himself in the war of survival. The immune system is the source of attack and defence against germs, polarizing its absolute functionality towards weakness is a slow death.
Its response is best a function of its antigen state. An antigen is any substance that can spark an immune response.
We have a disputed cure
Artemisia plant is a source of the acclaimed clinical drug for the cure of COVID19 as discovered by Madagascar, an island off the coast of Africa. The claim which surfaced a few months back has entered into a war of science and political acceptability of ‘druggie-herbs’ that can cure COVID19. The plant available in various forms is also referred to as wormwood, mugwort and other scientific names.
Madagascar President, Andry Rajoelina says the CVO + juice has turned around the fate of its citizens amidst the pandemic. A clinical trial to substantiate its potency is on the way as the drug will be available in tonic, capsule and also as an injectable solution, from the extract of the plant.
The most agreeable truth as stated since COVID19 broke out into lives globally is that all individuals need to have a vibrant immune system, to stand a chance to resist the predator disease having lost more than 517,000 people.
According to Vox, Science and Health, “The Covid-19 coronavirus meets its most formidable foe the moment it enters the human body. The immune system is waiting, ready for action, and it determines who dies and who survives. It is why the vast majority of the infected have recovered from the disease.”
Boosting immune and no rhetoric
The rhetoric that Africa may likely not produce the COVID19 cure may be true but the continent is a land-mass of herbs, shrubs, trees and plants that holds the ancient record of boosting the immune system of Africans to fight off diseased attacks with an increased chance of success.
Most daytime celebrated drugs are derivatives from significant plants growing behind someone’s yard fighting to the end diseases such as measles, chickenpox, HIV infection, pneumonia, malaria and typhoid.
The western culture has entangled a language of distrust about local herbs as a global combatant against diseases. The campaign against eastern medicine and African herbs surge on.
World Health Organisation reacted with a video
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has urged the government of Madagascar and other African governments to subject proposed cures for COVID-19 disease to scientific testing
According to BBC Future, ‘But let’s give those saying you can “boost” your immune system the benefit of the doubt and assume they mean that certain products can improve the immune response in a useful way – rather than literally “boost” it.
If you’re healthy, forget supplements – except vitamin D
Many multivitamins claim to provide “immune support” or to help “maintain healthy immune function”
Fundamental science argues that the body is self-regulatory and would do much to stay healthy and also quickly asserts its own health status on the intake from food, drinks and other sources.
The invariable claim that an immunity tribe of people cannot exist before becoming exposed should baffle the science world. For centuries, humans continue to develop a string of resistance before/during/after exposure, so why should an early assertion that COVID19 is not contractable to some humans or dead on arrival not be believed?
Author: This is opinion editorial is published by Femi D Amele, a multi-award winning journalists based in Nigeria