AFP: Mum knows best: Homemade soup may fight malaria
“…A new study suggests that certain homemade broths — made from chicken, beef, or even just vegetables — might have properties that can help fight malaria. Researcher Jake Baum of Imperial College London asked children from diverse cultural backgrounds at state-funded Eden Primary School to bring in homemade clear soup broth from recipes that had been passed down across generations to treat fever. The samples were filtered and incubated with cultures of Plasmodium falciparum, a parasite that accounts for an estimated 99.7 percent of malaria cases in Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Of 56 soup samples tested, five were more than 50 percent effective in curbing growth of the parasite, two with similar success as one drug currently used to treat malaria, Baum and his team reported Tuesday in the Archives of Disease in Childhood…” (11/19).

Additional coverage of the study is available from CNN and The Telegraph.