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Singapore: The world risks wiping out a huge amount of future antibiotics and disease cures if it fails to reverse the rapid extinction of thousands of plant and animal species, experts warned on Wednesday.
Biodiversity loss has reached alarming levels, and disappearing with it are the secrets to finding treatments for pain, infections and a wide array of ailments such as osteoporosis and cancer, they said, citing the findings of a coming book.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), said more than 16,000 species are threatened with extinction.
"We must do something about what is happening to biodiversity," he said at a news conference on the sidelines of the UN-backed Business for the Environment conference.
"Societies depend on nature for treating diseases. Health systems over human history have their foundation on animal and plant products that are used for treatment."
Patents of nature
Technological revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries took the focus on finding cures away from nature as pharmaceutical companies relied on technical components to make medicines, he said.
These companies are increasingly turning back to nature as they run out of chemical compounds. But the world is "losing the intellectual patents of nature before we even have the chance to understand or unravel them," Steiner said. "This is the tragedy of not understanding biodiversity."
The book, previewed at the conference, cited the example of the southern gastric brooding frog discovered in the rainforests of Australia in the 1980s. It has since become extinct.
In other animals, the young would have been digested by enzymes and acids in the stomach. But preliminary studies show the baby frogs produced a substance or a range of substances that inhibited acid and enzyme secretions and prevent the mother from emptying her stomach into her intestines while the young were developing.
Research on those frogs could have led to new insights into preventing and treating human peptic ulcers which affect 25 million people in the United States alone, according to the authors of the book, Sustaining Life.
The book is the work of more than 100 experts, its key authors based at Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, and it underscores what may be lost to human health when species go extinct, Steiner said.
Steiner said the book looks at seven groups of threatened organisms for potential or known medical value: amphibians, bears, cone snails, sharks, non-human primates, horseshoe crabs and gymnosperms, a type of plant life.
Last year, more than 16,000 species were labelled as threatened with extinction.
Do you know of any other harmful affects that a loss of biodiversity can have? How do you contribute to protecting the environment? Tell us at letter2editor@gulfnews.com
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