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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (3532)	10/1/2004 7:24:30 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

Most yew tree barks in China has already been exported to the US, and now they think to protect?--"China, U.S. seek to protect cancer-fighting tree" NEW YORK, Oct 1 (Reuters) The United States and China want to expand trade regulations to protect Asian yew trees, a plant that provides the compound for one of the world's top-selling chemotherapy drugs but is threatened by poaching. Chinese herbalists have used trees of the taxus species, also known as yew trees, for centuries to treat common ailments. In the late 1960s, scientists in North Carolina found that extract of yew bark fought tumors, and in the early 1990s, the U.S. government approved the use of paclitaxel, also known as taxol, by drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb for chemotherapy. Taxol, whose patent expired in the United States in 2001, is one of the best-selling drugs for treating lung, ovarian and breast cancers. In 2003, drug companies sold more than 4 billion dollar of products with taxol and other drugs derived from yew trees known as taxanes. Yews grow in Asia, Europe and North America, but in some regions of China they have been ravaged by peasants who illegally fell them to sell the bark to the international pharmaceutical trade, said Pat Ford, a botanist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington, and member of CITES, a U.N. body formerly known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Some Chinese companies are also suspected of using a traditional method to extract taxol that involves the wasteful cutting down of 3,000 trees to make less than half a pound (0.225 kg) of taxol, CITES said. deepikaglobal.com