Rainy weather causes medicinal herbs to rotten

Dong Xiaobin, volunteer of the earthquake relief work at Lalu Village in Qi County, Gansu Province and a teacher at Qin Xu Middle School, called the reporter at noon today. “The medicines cannot be transported and the villagers are dying.” Because of the rainy days, the herbs of the affected villagers are dying. We hope that people with love will lend a helping hand and save their remaining assets.

Dingxi, Gansu is a famous production base for high-quality Chinese medicinal materials. An interview with the reporter in the earthquake area found that the ruins of Yongxing Village, Yongguang Village, and Lalu Village near the epicenter were buried with a lot of Chinese medicinal materials such as Radix Astragali, Chinese angelica and Codonopsis pilosula. After the search and rescue of the wounded were completed, one of the most important tasks of the troops and armed police officers and volunteers participating in the earthquake relief work was to help the villagers rescue the Chinese herbal medicines from the rubble and move them to a safe location.

However, from the 24th till the present, Dingxi has been raining continuously. Although the local government distributed color strip cloth to the victims to block the rain, it was still difficult to stop the mold from decaying. Rainfall also made the road to the towns on the hills muddy and impeded the transfer of medicinal herbs.

Dong Xiaobin said that there are nearly 200 villagers in Lalu Village, each of which has about 1 ton of radix astragalus. If calculated at 30 yuan per kg, these quails are worth nearly 6 million yuan. In addition, the villagers also have a large number of Angelica and Codonopsis. If you count nearby villages such as Yongxing and Yongguang, this will be a big number. "The most terrible thing is that for most affected people, these medicines are their only remaining assets."