MY mother bled to death on August 5, 1959, unable to expel the placenta after the birth of her fifth child, the fourth boy. I was too young then at nine to understand what happened. All I knew was that I went to school in the morning and returned home in the afternoon, to find a huge crowd of aunties and uncles in our two-room residence at the then Southern Police College (SPC), Ikeja, Lagos, many of them sobbing or weeping. Doctors and nurses were few then at the Ikeja General Hospital, now Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), where she died.
As I learned later, she bled for hours, with no help in sight. With the expansion of knowledge in Alternative medicine in Nigeria today, I often wonder when I hear stories of maternal death, such as hers, if she would not have survived on Papaya (Pawpaw) leaf juice drink, Apple Cider vinegar drink and even Lemon grass tea.
Hospital medicine and protocols have made tremendous progress since my mother’s death. So, it is doubtful if, today, a woman will die in the labour room as easily as my mother did in 1959, simply because they cannot expel the placenta and will go on bleeding without help long after they have been delivered of their babies. But pregnant women still die easily of other causes, especially from malaria fever and the complications of this disease of the blood which many people take for granted. Even children under the age of five fare no better. Malaria fever and its complications still wipe out their population as easily as one can wipe out a gathering of mosquitoes or cockroaches with the strike of a bunch of broomsticks or the spray of an insecticide.
Some of the figures the health sector in Nigeria is working with suggest that as many as 30 million pregnant women are threatened by Malaria yearly. About 10,000 maternal deaths occur every year. About 200,000 new borns are killed every year.
According to www.unicef.org:
“Malaria remains a major public health problem in Nigeria. An estimated 300,000 children die of the disease each year, and up to 11 percent of maternal mortality is caused by it…which represents one in four deaths of children and one in 10 deaths of pregnant women.”
UNICEF, the United Nations children’s Emergency Fund, goes on to warn us that “it is estimated half of the population of Nigerian adults suffer from at least one episode of malaria annually while children under five years have as many as three or four episodes every year, adding:
“There are nearly 110 million clinically-diagnosed cases of malaria annually accounting for 60 percent out-patient visits and 30 percent of hospitalisations. It is not difficult to see that in addition to its direct health impact, the disease imposes a heavy social and economic burden. Indeed, about N132 billion (about 900 million U.S. Dollars) are lost to malaria annually in prevention and treatment costs and productivity.”
What exhumed these figures about two weeks ago for public consumption in Nigeria again was the visit to this country by Microsoft founder BILL GATES, said to be the world’s richest or second richest person. He is an investor in public good, and had come to Nigeria in the course of such an investment to persuade the Federal Government to invest more in human capital, education and health in particular. He told the President, and I believe the Federal cabinet as well, that life expectancy in Nigeria at about 53 years, was one of the lowest in the world, even when rated against those of other low-income or poor nations of the earth.
My family
When I hear or read about these disturbing stories about malaria fever, I thank the Good Lord for the health of my family. My wife and one of the children are genotype AA, the genotype group that is easily prone to malaria attacks. But I cannot easily remember when any of the children missed school while at home on account of malaria or when they and their mother or my good self ended up in hospital because of it. Some dietary habits may have been responsible for this. I remember once that we ended up in hospital with high temperature in respect of one of the children. The doctor wanted to prescribe anti-malarial drugs. I suggested it couldn’t be malaria. He advised it was better to start the treatment from that assumption. In the end, we reached a compromise. The child would be given the injections and all that. But before then, his blood would be tested for malaria and other parasites. The child began the prescription. And the result of the blood test ruled out malaria! He had a Urinary Tract Infection (UTI). That day, I learned it could be dangerous to sit a child in the bath tub while bathing him or her. Adults, too, bathe in the bath tub, wee in it and do not sanitise it thereafter!
While our children were growing up, they took at least one clove of garlic with every meal. Garlic is presented in Alternative Medicine as a cure for many diseases, especially respiratory infections. So effective is it in many cases, even in ear infections (otitis media), that it is nicknamed “the poor man’s penicillin”. In addition to that, my wife prescribed a pre-breakfast protocol for all of us. Anyone who did not take a glass or two of warm Lemon grass tea or that of Chanka Piedra (Ehinbisowo or Ehin Olube in Yoruba) or Bitter melon (Karela in India or Ejinrin in Yoruba) or even brimstone would not have breakfast that morning. We lived first at 34 Ajanaku Street, Opebi, Ikeja, Lagos and, later, at 39 Emina Crescent, off Toyin Street, also in Ikeja, Lagos. Both houses were single dwellings and provided us large grounds to cultivate no fewer than 100 bunch heads of Lemon grass in the flower beds, from which our neighbours and friends benefited as well. As for Ehinbisowo, I always kept an empty sack of 50kg rice in the booth of my car. Anywhere I found it to be growing beautifully, I harvested some and kept in the sack. Back home, I treated them to make them edible. We boiled the dried leaves and roots or made the powder into a tea. Ehinbisowo is good where a diuretic is required. It is anti-malarial, anti-biotic, anti-viral, crusher of kidney stones and gall bladder stones, anti-pain, anti-hypertensive and a good source of iron. I am tempted to reveal a secret about it to which I was let last Friday by a Nigerian doctor close to 80. Not to even Miss Boluwatife Baderinwa would I release it until this doctor is ready to let the cat out of the bag. Boluwatife, from Babcock University, approached me sometime last year for a number of subject ideas for her degree project study. I suggested Chanka Piedra, and she remains till this day grateful for the choice. We should not yield in temptation, we are told. So, I would guard my pen and fingers as I do guard my tongue. But I would like to say, nevertheless, that if this doctor’s dream about Chanka Piedra comes through, it would have reverberations on orthodox medicine world-wide!
Women’s health
Hus…..h!
A wife is the goose which lays the golden eggs in her family. She must get pregnant soon after her marriage, if not before, otherwise all eyes would be on her. Often, she gets into marriage under the notion that she is going into a strange family and, so, becomes psychologically and psychically prepared to do battle with her in-laws, especially a mother-in-law, where one exists. This inner turmoil saps her of energy at physical and etheric levels, and disarranges her hormonal balance with dire consequenses for fertility and general well-being. She goes to work to supplement her family income, and she must hurry home, usually under stressful conditions, to take the children back from school. This, also, robs her of energy, without her husband recognising it. The children must be prepared for school. That means she must be up before 5a.m to fix a meal for everyone. The house must be kept clean. She has her own parent and siblings to look after. She becomes a pain in the neck if she has no time for her in-laws. And her work in the office must not suffer. Her problems are compounded if her husband is an out-door man, or the children are not doing well or in and out of hospital. Before she notices it, the flame of love in her marriage begins to burn out. It may shatter her emotionally if her husband becomes less responsive at her beck and call. It is under those conditions of physical and etheric energy discomfeitures that she is expected to get pregnant and to be delivered of healthy, bouncing babies.
It is not well recognised that getting pregnant is like cultivating a farm for cropping. In land cultivation, not only is the farmland cleared and fertilised, heaps are also made before cropping and irrigation is encouraged alongside weed and pest control. In most pregnancies, hardly was any preparation made before the meeting of a man and the woman. And when you watch the diet of pregnant women today, you shake your head sorrowfully for them. Many of them were maternally depleted before the current pregnancy, the tell-tales revealing themselves outwardly, as a mirror of the internal terrain, in their hair, skin and nails. In this condition, the immune system may have become compromised. Doctors are reluctant to treat infections and malaria with the full weight of a prescription in this first three months of pregnancy lest the foetus be congenitally affected. Health authorities, therefore, suggest that women sleep in mosquito-treated nets. But many would not because they may feel hotter in such an environment already compromised by power failure. Where the family can afford an electricity generator to overcome this, the danger exists that some carbon monoxide may infiltrate the bedroom. This would rob the family of oxygen and load their blood circulation with carbon monoxide. Some studies suggest that certain secretions in the bodies of the pregnant woman attracts the mosquito to their bodies. When they are bitten, the malaria parasite threatens mother and forming baby. The baby may be born weak, and may depart soon after its delivery or a few months or years after, with more bites from the mosquito.
The diet
With stress and malaria parasites taking a toll in the body of an exposed pregnant woman, her only hope of riding the storms over may very well be her immune system and her nutrition. I would quickly like to mention, ahead of a discussion of these, that the havoc the parasite does is the destruction of red blood cells, the carriers of oxygen throughout the body. The pregnant woman and her baby need oxygen to live, like all of us. Yet, malaria parasites are destroying their means of obtaining oxygen in all the cells of their bodies. In this condition, they cannot grow healthy and strong, but weak and prone to illnesses. The doctor gives the pregnant woman Iron tablets, Folic acids, Vitamin C, Calcium and B-complex vitamins. He only tells her to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, which she may never do when she gets out of sight. She still gets back home to eat bread, consume milk for calcium and protein, without counting the cost to her health, eats a lot of today’s worm-like fast food and, of course, margarine in her jollof rice and with her bread, white or wheat. I am glad that, if many of us did not learn one or two lessons from the court cases recently over highly chemicalised so called soft drinks, we may learn them from the present storm in which Blue Band Margarine is riding in Nigeria. Its prosecutors are trying to say it may be a cause of strokes or heart attack arising from damage to blood vessels. Not only Blue Band Margarine may be guilty of these “charges”, if they are successfully proven. Blue Band Margarine is an hydrogenated fat which gives rise to trans fatty acids. All hydrogenated fats are guilty of producing these health hazards.
This column cannot in one or several articles discuss how pregnant women can protect their health and the health of their children, born and unborn, with a change of diet. This will be ongoing. Today, I only wish to suggest that they supplement their diet with powder greens. They are the powder forms of vegetables grown usually on organic farms. Most of the vegetables brought to the market are not only fertilizer grown, they are besides, wilted and deprived of life giving nutrient by the time they arrive in the market and the kitchen. Cooking may further deplete their nutrients. On the other hand, farms which consciously grow their vegetables organically not to fill the stomach but to impact positively on the health of the body, dry them into powder for this purpose. As the dry form is about 25 percent of the live form, one teaspoonful of, say, Spirulina, Kale, Wheatgrass, Asparagus, Cilantro, Barley grass, Whey protein or Lemon grass sprinkled on a plate of rice, beans, porridge (pap or yam porridge) should give multifolds of the live vegetable. Imagine taking Ewedu, Ugwu or Marigold flower like this everyday. Spirulina contains all the 23 amino acids for making proteins for mother and child. Kale, a vegetable, is richer than meat in protein. That is why it is nicknamed the MEATY VEGETABLE. They are all richer than egg, without the cholesterol side effects of egg. They have Vitamins, minerals and enzymes which are missing from many cooked foods. Pawpaw leaf powder and Lemon grass powder, in particular, specifically protect against malaria. I may return to these shortly.
Earlier, I mentioned Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV). It is wonderful not only for bone formation and bone health. It is good for hairs, nails and skin. It is good for nerves and eyes. Whenever my wife was pregnant, she took Apple Cider Vinegar with her meals. This ensured she did not lose more blood than was necessary in the birthing process. ACV helps to stop even excessive menstrual bleeding and dissolve menstrual blood clots. My mother may have profited from it. Pawpaw leaf juice does it as well. It stops the terrible multiple bleeding of Dengue fever and should that of its cousin, Ebola Fever, because it helps the bone marrow to produce blood platelet cells which stop bleeding. Cancer doctors at the University of Tokyo and those at the University of Florida have found uses for it in every cancer therapies!
Lemon grass
Nigeria’s pregnant women, children still dying like rat. I will return to lemon grass. But I wish before then to quickly suggest that pregnant women consume good measures of Omega-3 fatty acid from deep sea fish. Many studies suggest it helps the brains, eyes and nerves of foetuses grow well, is good for immune function, builds resistance and is anti-inflammatory apart from being a natural blood thinner. As a youth, I hated Titus fish. But as a father and husband, I used to buy a carton of it which we kept in the freezer for all meals. I cannot talk here about other food supplements for the pregnant woman since this column is more or less limited to the havocs of malaria fever on them. So, back to the good, old Lemongrass, we must quickly return.
I have been writing elsewhere in my advocacy that this be accepted and enthroned along with similar helpful herbs as a Nigerian natural tea. It grows almost everywhere in the villages not only as an anti-snake grass. It has been investigated by no less competent authorities as an anti-malaria by both the Federal Institute of Industrial Research, Oshodi (FIIRO) and the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH). Both studies and many more confirm that water extracts of it kill malaria parasites in the bloodstream.
Many foreign studies confer about 25 or more health benefits on Lemon grass. Some of them are as follows:
Lowers cholesterol..Detoxifies the body..Prevents cancer..Fights Staphylococus aureus..Cub stomach disorders..Treats insomnia..Treats respiratory disorders..Cures fever..Treat infections..Reduces pains and aches..Builds and calms the nervous system..Treats Type 2 diabetes..Prevents rheumatism..Boosts immunity..Help skin care..Improves cellular health..Treats edema..Has aromatherapy oil..Fights obesity..Clears body odour..Act as an insect repellant..Has culinary uses.
For the assemblage of the health benefits of Lemongrass mentioned above, credit goes to www.organicfacts.net which supports our health ventures with the post titled: 25 SURPRISING BENEFITS OF LEMON GRASS. Please share your experiences in the use of Lemongrass and other herbs mentioned in this column or elsewhere with other readers of this column.
How I wish my mother had the benefit of herbs for pregnancy and birthing, as many women enjoy today!
