Herbal Health Hazard

The words 'natural', 'botanical', and 'herbal' when applied to remedies and supplements conjure notions of health and wellness. But often what those words really mean is that the pill or potion in question has not been rigorously tested for either safety or efficacy. A prime example of when 'natural' does not mean 'safe' is the Aristolochia genus of plants (pictured), used in traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of a wide range of ailments. It's well established that aristolochic acid, abundant in these plants, is a potent carcinogen that produces a distinct mutational signature in a person’s DNA. There's strong evidence that ingestion of the compound leads to cancers of the kidney and urinary tract and new research now also links the acid to liver cancers. Worryingly, although the dangers are well documented, it is thought many people continue to use these plants as natural alternative medicines.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Franz Xaver. Wikimedia Commons
• Research from Centre for Computational Biology, Duke-NUS Medical School, and Laboratory of Cancer Epigenome, Division of Medical Science, National Cancer Centre Singapore.
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0) licence
• Research published in Science Translational Medicine, October 2017