Take a walk through the countryside around Guilin, a bustling town in the Guangxi region of southern China, and your eyes are immediately drawn up towering limestone peaks and down fast-flowing rivers. But one of the most remarkable things in this dramatic landscape is one of the easiest to overlook-a common plant which the Chinese call qinghao, and which western botanists have dubbed Artemisia annua. Artemisia holds the key to beating malaria, a disease that strikes at least 300m people a year, and kills around a million, mainly young children, throughout sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. But Artemisia is also at the centre of a storm in international public health, as rising prices and short supplies threaten global efforts to loosen malaria's grasp on the developing world.
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