Artemisinin, an anti-malaria drug discovered by Nobel Prize winner Tu Youyou and her Chinese colleagues, has been saving lives in Ghana, pharmacists have said.
Arnold Ferdinand, a pharmacist at a community near the capital Accra, said there has been a vast improvement in treatment of malaria in Ghana since artemisinin was introduced.
The patients start to get better "within a very short time" after receiving artemisinin-based combination therapy, he said.
"Normally, when you are treating any condition, malaria especially, you want a drug that will reduce the severity of the condition, minimize the incidence of death, and even reduce the duration of the ailment and then especially a drug that the parasite wouldn't show any resistance to. This is what the artemisinin molecule has brought to us," he told Xinhua in an interview.
Kwabena Bimpong, a senior pharmacist at Pills and Tabs, a popular family healthcare shop in Accra, described artemisinin as a life-saving drug in Ghana.
Malaria is said to be a major deadly disease in the West African country, as statistics show it kills some 4,000 people every year.
Chinese herbal expert Tu Youyou was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for her work in discovering the medicine that has saved millions of lives.
"For a drug to have such a tremendous impact in Africa and Ghana, I think the Nobel prize winner deserves it," Bimpong said.
Tu, 84, is the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize.
