ABSTRACT
Archaeology provides records of past successes with food security and crops fit for purpose (Logan et al. 2019). [...]to tackle the global challenge that is hunger, archaeology must produce solutions. Inequality, access to health care and wellbeing, poverty eradication, safe settlements and climate change are some of the local issues with a global resonance. Unfortunately, some of these interests are far removed from the everyday needs of populations languishing in hunger, poverty, inequality and suffering the effects of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic (Chirikure et al. 2010;Logan et al. 2019;Dandara et al. 2021). Since the launch of this agenda, academics, businesspeople, policy leaders and community leaders, among others, have engaged to translate this vision into reality (DeGhetto et al. 2016).
ABSTRACT
This opinion commentary on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic brings together observations from Zimbabwe specifically, and Africa broadly, drawing from the fields of pharmacogenomics, precision herbal medicine, and responsible innovation so as to respond to the pandemic in ways that are efficient, critically informed, principled, and responsive to needs in rural and urban communities across Africa. With new findings suggesting that COVID-19 is a systemic disease, impacting the respiratory system and beyond in some individuals, we need new molecular targets for therapeutics innovation more than ever. We argue that the current pandemic will likely strip the limited resources from other diseases such as malaria, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, and among others affecting the African continent. Hence, we need to address not only COVID-19 but also its broader health care and societal impacts in Africa. Extensive diagnostic testing to trace and isolate the COVID-19 cases as well as basic income and economic support for those who are unable to work will be needed. A critically informed and democratic governance that builds on transparency and trust for the elected leaders is crucial. Finally, the pandemic offers a silver lining for Africa: the prospects to integrate omics research with long-standing expertise in herbal medicine in Africa, thus accelerating the advances toward novel molecular therapeutic targets for COVID-19 and precision herbal medicine worldwide.