WELCOME to our humble meeting place….First, a few words about mangosteens! The mangosteen is a well-loved tropical fruit often appearing for sale during the durian [ king of tropical fruits ] season. The fruit has a hard rind that softens when ripe, allowing gentle determined pressure to release the delicious contents. A quality fruit is typically exquisitely sweet yet titillatingly sour. Like human beings and human life, good comes with bad, and sour with sweet. The mangosteen also reminds me of each person, billions of people on earth, but in each, a treasure of goodness and source of hidden talents, just to be revealed and enjoyed when the time is ripe!
A friend of mine once had been down with bouts of diarrhea and stomach upset. This friend seemed much more cheerful after taking this Queen of fruits.
Searching on the web, interestingly, mangosteens are rich in fiber, vitamins C, B1/B2, Folate, minerals like copper, manganese and magnesium, The rind is crushed and prepared into a treatment for dysentery and as a wash to treat skin infection and inflammation.
In Singapore, one young student scientist has been studying the possible development of a substance in the rind, called alpha-mangostin, for use in the treatment of a category of breast cancer! Other active plant chemicals incluclude tannins,polypyphenols and xanthanoids.
Update Feb 2014 : Newspaper reports today announced the development of a new powerful anti-biotic derived from alpha-mangostin! This anti-biotic has been tested and shown to be effective and more potent than currently available medicines. It is also easily absorbed and takes care of another hurdle to successful deployment. According to Prof Roger Beuerman, the work is the result of joint efforts by The National University of Singapore [NUS] Department of Chemistry, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, The Bioinformatics institute and South China University of Technology. The alpha-mangostin derivatives that the team formulated was shown to work against the feared bug and hospital prevalent Drug-resistant MRSA [ methicillin resistant Staphylococcus Aureus ]. The drug apparently acts by disrupting the bacteria’s cell membrane; small doses are effective, and this may be an advantage to delay eventual development of resistance to this anti-biotic. It is estimated that 4-5 years may be needed to bring this drug onto the market. Let’s pray everything goes well!
There’s HOPE if this antibiotic can do the needful to counter these fearsome bacteria and save millions of lives yearly, while other measures are being researched and developed.
At last count, we had 6-7 billion people on this planet! Like the mangosteens on display, we will find it difficult to focus on individual needs- when faced with the need to provide for a sea of humanity. Nonetheless, we will try to focus on a problem, a person, one at a time, so that we can have the best considered outcomes, sour and/or sweet, the best of experiences despite limited resources.
