To fight against malaria, home made soups might help as researchers have found that some of the soup recipes have anti-malarial properties.
"Malaria kills more than 400,000 people per year and infects more than 200 million, yet resistance to our frontline drugs continues to emerge," said study lead researcher Jake Baum, Professor at Imperial College London, in UK.
"We may have to look beyond the chemistry shelf for new drugs, and natural remedies shouldn't be off our watch list," Baum further added in a comment.
For the study, published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, researchers from Imperial College London with school children test their family soup broths for activity against the malaria parasite.
Several of the soup broths, collected from traditional family recipes that originated around the world, showed activity against the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, either by curbing its growth or preventing it from maturing.
The soup recipes had been passed down through the generations for the treatment of fever. Five of the broths were able to curb growth of the parasite in its disease-causing stage by more than 50 percent.
In two of these, the inhibitory activity was comparable with that of a leading anti-malarial drug, dihydroartemisinin.
Four other broths were more than 50 pe rcent effective at blocking the ability of the parasites to mature to a form that infects mosquitoes, potentially blocking the process of transmission.
Dihydroarteminisin contains artemisinin, which was isolated from a traditional Chinese herbal medicine.