Traditional Liver Remedies From Ethiopia Fail a Simple Toxicity Test, Raising Safety Alarms

In the Gamo community of southern Ethiopia, three plants have long been trusted allies against liver disease: Clutia lanceolata, Amaranthus caudatus, and Solanum incanum. Healers prepare their leaves and roots as water infusions or strong alcoholic extracts, and patients take them on the assumption that anything grown from the earth must be gentle on the body. A new laboratory study from Arba Minch University now challenges that assumption in striking fashion. Using one of toxicology’s simplest and most widely used screening tools, the brine shrimp lethality assay, the researchers found that every extract they tested was highly lethal to the tiny test organisms, with some killing half of the exposed animals at concentrations of just a few micrograms per milliliter. The work, published in BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies, does not prove these plants are dangerous to humans, but it delivers a clear warning that natural origin is not the same as safety, and that remedies taken for liver ailments deserve rigorous scrutiny before they are consumed freely.

The stakes of the question are considerable. Liver diseases claim more than two million lives every year across the globe, and in regions where access to diagnostic laboratories and hepatology specialists is limited, traditional medicine often fills the gap. Ethiopia is home to a rich pharmacopoeia of native plants used for jaundice, hepatitis-like illnesses, and other hepatic complaints, yet the majority of these botanicals have never been subjected to systematic toxicological evaluation. That gap between widespread use and thin evidence is precisely what motivated the research team, led by Abel Alemayehu and colleagues with corresponding author Seyoum Gizachew, to put three of the most commonly cited Gamo liver remedies through a standardized lethality screen. Their study was supported by Arba Minch University, which also supplied the brine shrimp eggs used in the assay, and received no external funding.

The technical heart of the study is the brine shrimp lethality assay, or BSLA, a bioassay that has earned its place in natural product research because it is cheap, fast, and surprisingly informative. Brine shrimp eggs, typically of the species Artemia salina, are hatched in artificial seawater under light and aeration, producing a swarm of free-swimming nauplii within a day or two. These nauplii, each only a few hundred micrometers long, are then distributed into wells or vials containing serial dilutions of the plant extract under investigation. After a fixed incubation period, in this case twenty-four hours, the researcher simply counts how many animals have died at each concentration. From those counts, a statistical technique called probit analysis converts the dose-response relationship into a single, comparable number: the lethal concentration fifty, or LC50, the dose that kills half of the exposed population.

The convention used in the field is straightforward. Extracts with an LC50 below 100 micrograms per milliliter are considered highly toxic, those between 100 and 500 micrograms per milliliter are regarded as moderately toxic, and values above 500 micrograms per milliliter are generally taken as relatively safe. The thresholds are not a direct prediction of human toxicity, since brine shrimp are invertebrates and mammalian physiology differs in important ways, but decades of use have shown that very low LC50 values flag plants that contain potent bioactive compounds and warrant caution and further investigation. In this sense the assay functions as an early alarm rather than a final verdict, prioritizing which botanicals should move forward to more sophisticated and expensive testing in cell cultures and animal models.

The Arba Minch team prepared their plant materials in two ways that mirror real-world practice. Aqueous extracts, made by decoction, represent the water-based infusions and decoctions that traditional healers actually administer to patients. The 80 percent methanol extracts, produced by maceration, were included because organic solvents pull out a broader and often more concentrated range of plant chemicals, including compounds that are poorly soluble in water. Methanol extraction is a standard approach in phytochemistry for capturing the full chemical repertoire of a plant, and comparing the two extraction methods allowed the researchers to see whether the water-soluble fraction alone carries the toxic burden or whether less polar constituents contribute as well. Across all three plants, the 80 percent methanol method yielded more extract by weight, with yields ranging from 5.4 to 8.1 percent of the starting plant material.

The results were unambiguous and, in places, startling. All three aqueous extracts fell into the highly toxic category, each with an LC50 below 100 micrograms per milliliter. The most potent of the water extracts came from Amaranthus caudatus, the amaranth known in many parts of the world as a food plant, which killed half of the nauplii at a concentration of just 1.91 micrograms per milliliter. Among the methanol extracts, the highest toxicity was recorded for Clutia lanceolata, with an LC50 of 1.28 micrograms per milliliter, a figure that places it among the more lethal plant extracts reported in this type of screening. Every one of the tested 80 percent methanol extracts also crossed the high-toxicity threshold, meaning that neither the traditional water preparations nor the more exhaustive solvent extractions could be described as benign.

Equally telling was the pattern of mortality over time and dose. The researchers observed that death rates climbed both with increasing extract concentration and with longer exposure, a classic dose- and time-dependent relationship that strengthens confidence in the finding. At the maximum concentration tested, 1000 micrograms per milliliter, all six extracts achieved complete mortality, wiping out every nauplius within twenty-four hours. By contrast, the control group, treated only with distilled water, showed minimal deaths, confirming that the lethality came from the plant chemistry rather than from the test conditions themselves. This internal control matters because brine shrimp nauplii are delicate organisms, and a poorly run assay can produce false positives through simple handling stress or poor water quality. The clean control results indicate the assay behaved as expected.

What might be responsible for such potency? The study did not identify the specific molecules involved, and the authors are careful not to speculate beyond their data. But each of the three plants carries chemical families known to produce strong biological effects. Solanum incanum, a spiny relative of the tomato and eggplant, is notorious for steroidal glycoalkaloids such as solasonine and solamargine, compounds with documented cytotoxic and membrane-disrupting activity. Clutia lanceolata belongs to a genus whose members contain diterpenes and other irritant principles. Amaranthus species contain saponins and other secondary metabolites whose safety profile depends heavily on dose and preparation. Any or all of these could account for the low LC50 values, and teasing out the responsible compounds will require phytochemical fractionation followed by testing of isolated molecules, a natural next step for the team and for other groups working on Ethiopian medicinal flora.

The authors’ conclusion is measured but firm: the aqueous and 80 percent methanol extracts of all three plants are highly toxic in this assay, and their use therefore demands caution. It is worth being precise about what that means and what it does not. A low LC50 in brine shrimp does not establish that a traditional dose harms a human liver, and some celebrated drugs, including several chemotherapy agents, would also fail this screen spectacularly. Toxicity and therapeutic value can coexist, separated only by dose. But when a plant is taken repeatedly, self-administered, and unstandardized, as these Gamo remedies typically are, the margin between a helpful amount and a harmful one becomes a matter of luck rather than measurement. For patients already suffering from liver disease, whose organs may have diminished capacity to handle chemical stress, that uncertainty is especially troubling.

The broader lesson of the study reaches well beyond southern Ethiopia. Around the world, the appeal of natural remedies rests heavily on the intuition that plants, having coexisted with humanity for millennia, must be safe. Toxicology tells a different story: plants are, in effect, untitrated chemical cocktails, and many of the most dangerous poisons known to science come from leaves, roots, and seeds. What the Arba Minch researchers have shown is that a screening assay costing pennies per sample, requiring no specialized animal facility, and deliverable in a university laboratory within days, can flag potentially hazardous botanicals before they cause harm. Their work offers a template that other communities and research groups can replicate cheaply, pairing the preservation of traditional knowledge with the scientific rigor needed to decide which remedies deserve trust and which deserve a warning label.

Subject of Research: Toxicity screening of Ethiopian medicinal plants used for liver diseases using the brine shrimp lethality assay

Article Title: Evaluation of the toxicity of aqueous and 80% methanol extracts of selected medicinal plants used for liver diseases in Gamo Community, South Ethiopia, using the brine shrimp lethality assay

Article References: Alemayehu, A., Gashaye, A., Getachew, F., Dilbar, R., Adane, T., Tufer, S., & Gizachew, S. (2026). Evaluation of the toxicity of aqueous and 80% methanol extracts of selected medicinal plants used for liver diseases in Gamo Community, South Ethiopia, using the brine shrimp lethality assay. BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12906-026-05575-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12906-026-05575-0

Keywords: brine shrimp lethality assay, Clutia lanceolata, Amaranthus caudatus, Solanum incanum, medicinal plants, liver diseases, toxicity, LC50, Ethiopia, Gamo community, traditional medicine, Artemia salina