USPCEO Ron Piervincenzi, Ph.D., and ChP Secretary-General, Mr. Wei Zhang, signed the agreement, which establishes a framework for their cooperative engagement over the next three years. The partners agreed to collaborate to strengthen pharmacopeial standards as a means of assuring better patient and consumer care in China and the United States (U.S.).
Under this revised agreement, the two partners will intensify efforts to strengthen standards in respective pharmacopoeias, collaborate at the leadership level, exchange standards information and scientific personnel, and participate in joint standard-setting and harmonization activities.
To kick-off their renewed partnership, the pharmacopeias jointly hosted a workshop at USP, during which delegates from both organizations shared perspectives and priorities in standards development with participants from the pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies.
Delegates of the pharmacopoeias discussed developing harmonized, up-to-date global quality standards for high-impact excipients as a tangible area of cooperative effort given the important role these products play in the global supply chain.
Despite the complexity that globalization has created for organizations responsible for ensuring the quality and safety of medicines, science-based standards will continue to play a vital role in advancing quality, he said.
The partners expect their collaboration to encourage other organizations to join them in advancing the quality agenda in ways that help pharmaceutical manufacturers respond to patient needs, regulators establish quality assurance systems, and practitioners and patients maintain trust and confidence in drug therapies.
The medicinal properties of the cannabis plant have been known for millennia. As far back as 2800 BC, cannabis was used to treat a vast array of health problems and was listed in Emperor Shen Nung's pharmacopoeia.
Cannabis has a long and colourful history. The use of cannabis originated in central Asia or western China. Cannabis has been used for its alleged healing properties for millennia. The first documented case of its use dates back to 2800 BC, when it was listed in the Emperor Shen Nung's (regarded as the father of Chinese medicine) pharmacopoeia. Therapeutic indications of cannabis are mentioned in the texts of the Indian Hindus, Assyrians, Greeks and Romans. These texts reported cannabis to treat a vast array of different health problems, including arthritis, depression, amenorrhea, inflammation, pain, lack of appetite and asthma.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) holds over 2000 volumes of Chinese medical classics and a Chinese public health collection with thousands of items including posters, scrolls, pharmaceutical ads, and puzzles. These historical documents chart the remarkable medical discoveries and shifts in medical practice and policy from ancient China to the mid-20th century. This exhibition features traditional Chinese medical texts, anatomical posters, and pharmaceutical ads to explore facets of Chinese medicine from antiquity to modern times.
Before the 6th century AD, Buddhist priests from China introduced Chinese medicine to Korea and Japan. Traveling priests disseminated Chinese medical knowledge throughout these countries more widely during the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD).
Yin and Yang are the underlying principles of Chinese philosophy and medicine. Good health is believed to come from a balance of Yin (negative, dark, and feminine) and Yang (positive, bright, and masculine).
The earliest known medical text is attributed to the emperor Huang Ti. Huang-ti Nei ching (The Canon of Internal Medicine), consisting of two treatises, laid the foundations for the classics of Chinese medicine to come. Much like emperor Huang Ti, emperor Shen Nung, now considered the Father of Chinese medicine, provided great contributions through his meticulous study of herbs which is assumed to have led to the writing of Shen-nung pen ts'ao ching (Divine Husbandman's Materia Medica).
Following Huang-ti Nei ching (The Canon of Internal Medicine), Chang Chung-ching, known as the Hippocrates of China, made profound influences on Chinese medicine, in particularly his writing of 校正傷寒論 or Shang han lun (Treatise on Colds and Fevers). By the Ming dynasty, Li Shih-chen wrote one of the greatest Chinese pharmacopoeias compiling all known herbal medicines since the Huang-ti Nei ching to the late 16th century.
Following the works of some of the most influential Chinese emperors and physicians, other medical contributions across China, Japan, and Korea were made resulting in what is now considered traditional Chinese medicine. These books feature discoveries in acupuncture, surgery, herbal remedies, and early thoughts on communicable diseases.
In 2001, an exhibition called Classics of Traditional Chinese Medicine was prepared by Margaret Feng, Yoshiko Doherty, and Young Rhee of the National Library of Medicine. That website was updated in 2009 by Amanda Smith and Roxanne Beatty.
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The demand for their hard scales is highest in Asia, where they are commonly used in traditional medicines. Poachers making a living from this demand have depleted wild populations in Asia and Africa, and the pangolin's future is uncertain.
Chinese authorities have taken a first step in protecting this animal and clamping down on trade. The scales have been taken off the Chinese pharmacopoeia, an official list of medicines and ingredients approved for use.
It comes on the back of further hopeful news, as the Chinese State Forestry and Grassland Administration (SFGA) has also recently raised the protected status of pangolins to the highest level, with strict penalties on those caught killing or trading them. They are now in Class 1, the same level as pandas.
There are four Asian and four African species of pangolin, and there is a global ban on any commercial trade in their parts. Illegal trading is still a problem, and poachers can make large sums of money from their keratin scales, which in some cultures are believed to cure a wide range of ailments. Their meat is also considered a luxury food in China and Vietnam.
Of the eight species, three are classed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and it is estimated that authorities seized hundreds of thousands of animals just last year.
'This may be especially important for the four African species - although they are currently less threatened than the four Asian pangolin species, traffickers started to exploit them more once numbers of the Asian species got really low.
The international trade in wildlife either for medicines or food has been thrown into the spotlight after the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Chinese authorities forbade citizens from eating wildlife in February 2020, to maintain biological and ecological safety and prevent major public health risks.
The ban on medicinal use is welcome news for those working to protect these creatures, which benefit they ecosystems they live in. An adult pangolin may consume an estimated 70 million insects every year, providing natural pest control in areas where termites would otherwise cause substantial damage to manmade structures.
Conservation groups all over the world are fighting to protect pangolins from poachers, and the Museum collections are available to help with that work and play in role in global scientific discovery.
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As an important resource of medicinal plant, atractylodes is collected in national pharmacopoeia by China, Japan and Korea. Atractylodes has long been used as herbal medicine, and has significant features in its trueborn quality and geographical distribution13,14,15,16,17,18. In this research, we used atractylodes as a case to study the regionalization method of Chinese material medical quality. Specifically, based on the complete sample data and use the habitat suitability as the linkage, we studied the relationships between the quality of medical materials and ecological environment by the Maximum Entropy Model and other statistical analysis techniques. We also used the similarity of environment to grade the quality of medical materials and at last we achieved a map of regionalization of Chinese material medical quality.
The relationship between biology and environment is a core issue in ecology. The distributional suitability of organisms in the environment can be evaluated by species distribution model. The species distribution (it is also called habitat suitability model or environment niche model) covers many different models. It mainly relies on species distribution data which is already known to us and a series of environment variables to explore the species niche and its potential distribution. According to the data of model needed and its own principle, it can be divided into three different kinds, Group discriminant model, Frame model and Mechanism model19,20.
Entropy is an elementary concept in information theory. Shannon put forward the concept of entropy in an article of information theory domain in 1948 that entropy is used to describe the disorder of object, which is positively related to the degree of entropy, and the degree of uncertainness about object is called entropy21. Principle of maximum entropy (PME) adopts the principle to treat all the known and unknown objects: PME admits the known things while it does not make hypotheses for unknown things, which means that it keeps the uncertainness of object and lower the crisis to satisfy all known information. Under those conditions, attaining a probability distribution with less subjective prejudice, which is a most reasonable distribution22. The basic idea of PME is that offering a certain training sample and choosing a model according with the training sample. Maximum Entropy Model should choose a probability distribution conform to the discovery, and model gives a uniform probability distribution to other situations. The theory of PME is expressed in the bio ecology that one species would spreads and extends to the greatest extent possiblilities without any constraint condition, and close to the uniform probability distribution23,24. Steven Phillips and other people used the Java language to compile Maxent software on the basis of Maximum Entropy10.
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