Jenny Hope
Daily Mail
A common weed could help cure skin cancers, claim researchers.
The sap from a plant known as petty spurge or milkweed – found by roadsides and in woodland – can ‘kill’ certain types of cancer cells when applied to the skin.
It works on non-melanoma skin cancers, which affect hundreds of thousands of Britons each year.
They are triggered by sun damage and, although not usually fatal, can be disfiguring without treatment.
The plant has been used for centuries as a traditional folk medicine to treat conditions such as warts, asthma and several types of cancer.
But for the first time a team of scientists in Australia has carried out a clinical study of sap from Euphorbia peplus, which is related to Euphorbia plants grown in gardens in the UK.
The study of 36 patients with a total of 48 non-melanoma lesions included basal cell carcinomas (BCC), squamous cell carcinomas (SCC) and intraepidermal carcinomas (IEC), a growth of cancerous cells confined to the outer layer of the skin.
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