The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7507 p761
21 June 2008

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Culling those carrot-crunching coypu

How ouzo may lead to better drugs

Should St Alban replace St George?

Culling those carrot-crunching coypu

When I was but a lad, my school sent me to Suffolk for a week-long biology course at the Flatford Mill Field Centre. The centre is housed in the mill itself, a building recognisable to many because it features in several paintings by John Constable. We students slept in the adjacent 16th century Willy Lott’s Cottage, which appears in one of Constable’s most famous works, “The hay wain”.

One evening we were taken out into the marshes after dark to hear the loud crunching noises made by feeding coypu, large nocturnal rodents with huge appetites and appalling table manners. A South American species, the coypu was introduced to East Anglia for its fur (nutria) in 1929, but some escaped from fur farms. Finding the local wetlands much to their liking, they bred rapidly. A female coypu averages about five young per litter, but can produce as many as 13 and have up to three litters a year.

By damaging drainage systems with their burrowing and by munching on the marsh roots that hold the wetland together, the coypu caused immense problems and in 1977 the Ministry of Agriculture began a programme to eliminate them. Trapping started in 1981 and I remember seeing large cage-traps baited with carrots during visits to Suffolk in the mid-1980s. The campaign succeeded and the pest was declared eradicated in 1989, after trappers had caught 35,000 animals at an estimated cost of £2.5m.

I was reminded of all this recently when I read about a US plan to tackle a similar, but larger, problem in the Mississippi delta. Twenty coypu were released in Louisiana in the 1930s and it has been estimated that they multiplied to 20 million within only 20 years.

There are now plans to control the Mississippi delta coypu population by luring them into traps, not with crunchable carrots but with the products of molecular science. Athula B. Attygalle, from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, working with a team of scientists from Cornell University and University of Iowa, has identified a range of terpenoids, fatty alcohols, fatty acids and fatty acid esters from solvent extracts prepared from the animal’s anal scent glands.

“ These compounds can serve as a powerful attractant to the animals,” says Professor Attygalle, “and thus, when applied strategically, serve as a tool in the efforts to control their spread in the easily damaged coastal ecosphere.”

Federal agencies had been considering various poisoning methods, but all would have had unwanted effects on other species. It remains to be seen whether bio-friendly molecular science will be successful.

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How ouzo may lead to better drugs

When my son was 13, one of his school friends joined us for a family holiday in an Auvergne farm cottage. After a two-day drive through France, we collected the cottage key from the farmer, who invited the boys into the farmhouse to practise their French and enjoy a drink while we adults unpacked. When they finally re-emerged, the boys could hardly walk straight. The milky-white aniseed cordial they had been innocently knocking back was actually a highly alcoholic pastis.

The experience did at least introduce them to the “ouzo effect” — the phenomenon whereby alcoholic drinks flavoured with the herb anise (Pimpinella spp) spontaneously form a cloudy emulsion when diluted before consumption. The drinks concerned include ouzo, raki, arak and pastis. Their emulsions can be stable for weeks, even months, but our knowledge of how they form and why they are so stable is as cloudy as the emulsions themselves.

According to a recent report from the American Chemical Society, scientists studying pastis have discovered that ouzo-effect emulsions do not show the behaviour expected of a well-bred emulsion, even when they used the posh brand Pernod. The researchers hope to use the odd properties in designing better emulsions in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, foodstuffs, cosmetics and other products.

Other recent ouzo-related research suggests that anise itself has unusual features that might be harnessed to make new medicines. The researchers found that its essential oils contain high levels of phenylpropanoids. Although these compounds occur in many plants, four of those isolated from anise had never before been identified and others had only ever been found in other Pimpinella samples.

When the anise phenylpropanoids were tested for activity against various disease organisms, a few showed some effectiveness against Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite, and Mycobacterium intracellulare, a problem in immunocompromised patients. Some also exhibited anti-inflammatory activities. Further research is needed to see whether anise may be a source of potent new pharmaceuticals.

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Should St Alban replace St George?

This Sunday, 22 June 2008, is celebrated by Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox Christians as the feast day of St Alban, Britain’s first Christian martyr. It has often been suggested that St Alban should replace St George as the patron saint of England.

Alban and George lived in the same era and were both beheaded by the Romans for their Christian beliefs. But, although our knowledge of both is more legend than history, it is beyond dispute that Alban was English and St George was not, despite his popular identification with English ideals of honour, bravery and gallantry.

St George, it appears, was born to Christian parents in Cappadocia (now part of Turkey) in the third century AD and later lived in Palestine, where he became a Roman soldier. When he protested against Rome’s persecution of Christians, he was imprisoned and tortured. Staying true to his faith, he was beheaded at Lydda in Palestine.

St Alban was born at Roman Verulanium (now St Albans) in the second or third century AD and was executed there on the hill that is now the site of St Albans Abbey. His birth date is unknown and the dates suggested for his death range from AD209 to AD305.

According to the Venerable Bede’s ‘Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum’ (‘Ecclesiastical history of the English people’), Alban was a pagan who sheltered a Christian priest in his home, and was converted and baptised by him. When Roman soldiers came looking for the priest, Alban exchanged cloaks with him and was arrested in his stead. He was taken before a magistrate who, furious at the deception, ordered that Alban be given the punishment due to the priest.

Apart from not being English, one problem with St George as patron saint of England is that he has to be shared with Aragon, Catalonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, Germany and Greece — not to mention assorted European cities, a plethora of occupations, sufferers from various diseases such as leprosy, plague and syphilis, and the Scout Movement. If the English were to opt for St Alban instead, they would have him pretty much to themselves.

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