‘Herbal tea has nothing to do with virus’

Islamabad : Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) researchers’ team have found that herbal or ‘senna’ tea has nothing to do with either the killing of viruses or inhibiting infection.

The QAU team conducted the research under the supervision of Dr. Syed Sikander Azam from the Computational Biology Lab at National Center for Bio-informatics, QAU.

The team investigated the binding potential of chemical compounds in comparison with the experimentally tested active phytochemicals against some proteins.

Objective of the study was to resolve the myth and explore the role and efficacy of such tea in treating infection as it was a widely circulated claim on electronic/social media.

Dr. Sikander further highlighted that the herbal tea constituents failed to act as a candidate of high ligand affinity capable of disrupting contact between the protein and receptor.

This shows that in daily routine the relational use of such tea, which is a norm in society, for various infections and consumption of such constituents under certain conditions is lethal and unintentionally held us responsible for deaths of geriatric patients particularly, via diuresis/dehydration/kidney failure, both in general and under pandemic hit situation.

Researchers have utilized advanced computational methods to identify functional molecular descriptors in medicinal-based active therapeutics and explore the binding affinities of phytochemicals vs some chemical compounds to probe the possible role of the herbal tea.