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Saturday, January 21, 2006The needles of pine, spruce and fir trees contain a fairly high concentration of shikimic acid, the main ingredient in Tamiflu. Countries all over the world are stockpiling the drug in anticipation of a bird flu pandemic. Most shikimic acid is obtained from star anise, a cooking spice from a tree grown in China. Prices of the spice skyrocketed when anxiety over a the possibility of a human outbreak of avian flu escalated. A small Canadian company, Biolyse Pharma Corp., is now processing thousands of discarded trees to retrieve the acid. It's too late for ours, which has been turned into a part of the city's mulch pile, but maybe next year..... posted by Sydney on 1/21/2006 07:29:00 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:And for the Bird Flu, there's Kimchee, the Korean relish. The BBC reported last Feb 2005 that Kimchee was even curing the birds themselves. By 10:12 PM , at |
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