It’s all the way in Africa, South America, and Asia so it doesn’t affect you right? Wrong! We are losing precious oxygen. Twenty percent of the world’s oxygen is produced in the Amazon rainforest. Many medicines can be made from the plants, trees, and animals of the rainforest. As of now, twenty-five percent of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients and of only one percent of the plants have been tested. Many of the plants are among the few that can fight cancer. Seventy percent of the 3000 plants active against cancer cells are found in the rainforest. Vincristine, extracted from the rainforest plant, periwinkle, is one of the world’s most powerful anticancer drugs. The deforestation of the rainforest also leads to other major problems like global warming. Twenty-five to thirty percent of the greenhouse gases released into the air are caused by deforestation of the rainforest.