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Calgary Herald, June 19th, 1998

When Marline Murdoch's life was threatened, and western medicine had run out of answers, a small nature preserve and medical research station deep in the heart of the Peruvian rainforest came to her rescue. Now Murdoch can return the favor as logging threatens the Peruvian rainforest which produced the treatment she credits with saving her life.

Trees are being taken from land within sight of the Isula Biological Preserve and Research Station, and Murdoch is among a group of Calgarians raising money to stop the loggers and expand the reserve.

"It's very important (to preserve the rainforest)," said Murdoch. "There are probably many people out there who have similar problems, who could be helped."

"We want to buy up as much of the area as we can to turn it into a larger reserve," said Brad Clarke, one of the organizers of a sold-out fundraising banquet Wednesday at the Palliser Hotel. "We can't protect the whole Amazon, but from Isula, it can grow." The land around the preserve can be bought for $100 US an acre, said Clarke.

The Isula reserve is a precious link between the rapidly disappearing front of ancient traditional healing knowledge and western medicine, says its founder, Dr. José Cabanillas. A medical doctor trained in western diagnosis and treatment, Cabanillas is from a family of traditional Peruvian healers steeped in knowledge of aboriginal treatments and jungle medicines.

He wants to use western scientific techniques to find the medically active ingredients in remedies used for thousands of years by jungle healers, and bring rainforest medicines to people in the western world.

Murdoch is thankful he has. She spent months of intensive testing to find the source of her illness, which drove her weight down from 140 to 82 pounds. Finally the problem was diagnosed as a form of beaver fever contracted on a vacation, a bacterial infection for which her family doctor and specialists to whom she was referred told her there was no treatment.

"My family thought I was going to die," said Murdoch. Someone suggested she try a three-week herbal cleanse developed by Isula station and "today my whole life has changed." She is healthy and has regained weight and been relieved of what she had been told was a life-long digestive problem .

Although her family doctor "pooh-poohed the idea," she was surprised tests showed the bacteria had been eliminated from Murdoch's system.

"We know less than one per cent of the active ingredients in traditional medicines of the Amazon," said Cabanillas. Such research is one of the purposes of the research station.

In the four years since it was founded, the reserve has been involved in a number of scientific studies, often involving Canadian university researchers, of the local plants and animals.

Simply identifying the plants is a huge task, since the Amazon contains a quarter of the earth's plant life, and the Isula preserve contains many different habitats, from lakeshore to mountaintop. "We find plants that aren't named yet," said Cabanillas, and tend others known to have been planted a century ago by jungle healers.

"We have a big concentration of animal and plant life in such a small place, just 2,000 square acres," said Dr. José Cabanillas, founder of Isula station.

The Isula station is located in the Iquitos Amazonian rainforest in northern Peru, one of the most species-rich areas of the world.

The preserve teaches local people alternatives to slash and burn agriculture, and has an animal rehabilitation and release program for native animals often seized from smugglers for the exotic pets market, and has started an eco-tourism retreat to introduce westerners to the Amazonian way of life.

Further information on the Isula Biological Preserve and Research Station, its treatments available in Canada and the fund-raising campaign, is available by calling Medicinal Plant Products Inc. 261-8888, fax 264-3310.

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