Atropa Belladonna, a poisonous plant, has been proved as an effective remedy in homoeopathic potencies to treat the dreaded disease, Japanese Encephalitis (brain fever).

Inspired by the success story of Andhra Pradesh where homoeopaths distributed Belladona free, followed by Calcarea Carb and Tuberculinum for preventing brain fever during a epidemic breakout, trials on rats were conducted in Kolkatta to re-prove the efficacy of Belladonna in different potencies.

The herbaceous plant, which is also known by different names as Beautiful lady, Devil’s Berries, Death Cherries or Deadly nightshade, is a highly toxic and poisonous. But it has high medicinal value and is used in other systems of medicine as a cosmetic, and hallucinogen in crude form.

Funded by the Central Council of Research in Homoeopathy (CCRH), the scientific experiments were conducted in the School of Tropical Medicine, Kolkota, with no effective medicine found in other systems of medicine, particularly Allopathy. The disease spreads faster with the virus propagated through pigs, resulting in high fever, swelling of the brain membranes and sudden death, particularly children.

The virus causing Japanese encephalitis is transmitted by mosquitoes belonging to the Culex tritaeniorhynchus and Culex vishnui groups, which breed particularly in flooded rice fields. The virus circulates in ardeid birds (herons and egrets). It also reproduces in pigs and infects mosquitoes that take blood meals, but does not cause disease. The virus tends to spill over into human populations when infected mosquito populations build up explosively and the human biting rate increases (these culicines are normally zoophilic, i.e. they prefer to take blood meals from animals).

Dr Jayesh R Bellare who presented his case study on how the homoeopathic drug Rhus Tox, (Toxicodendron pubesconis) has proved to be a model in “immuno modulatory activity” called for intensive inter-disciplinary studies involving pharmacy to biomedical groups for revalidation of homoeopathic drugs to face the oft-repeated criticism of the system.