ReviewAre West African plants a source of future antimalarial drugs?
Section snippets
Malaria and ethnopharmacology
One of the major threats concerning world public health is malaria. The mortality rate from malaria has been estimated to be approximately between 1.5 and 2.7 million per year, with more than 75% of these deaths occurring among African children (WHO, 2000).
The main reasons that explain this worsening situation are:
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Resistance to the current antimalarial drugs by Plasmodium falciparum (Trape et al., 2002).
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Lack of new therapeutic targets (Bathurst and Hentschel, 2006).
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Unavailability and
Ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology research
These approaches can benefit from the knowledge of medicinal plants among natives of regions of endemic malaria, where the appreciation of the use of plant products to treat febrile illnesses has evolved over many generations.
The main goal of ethnopharmacology has been to discover novel compounds, derived from plants used in indigenous medical systems, and which can be utilised in the development of new pharmaceuticals. An aspect of major interest is that the medicines were used directly on
Situation in West Africa
West Africa occupies an area in excess of 6,140,000 km2, or approximately one-fifth of Africa. The United Nations definition of Western Africa includes the following 16 countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
This area is one of the poor socio-political situations in the world, but West Africa remains rich in biological resources, both plants and animals. The natural
Methods: search strategy and selection criteria
Many different studies have been carried out on African herbal treatments for malaria. A PubMed research using key words (malaria, Africa, ethnobotany, West Africa, antimalarial activity, plant extracts) showed the burden of this disease, the limitations of the current global strategy and the role of traditional medicine in each country studied.
The articles selected concern studies on ethnobotany, on toxicity and on in vitro or in vivo antimalarial activity of plants from West Africa, and
Results
Forty-eight ethnobotanical studies from 1987 to 2007 in 9 out of 16 West sub-Saharan Africa countries have been collected (Table 1). The countries were: Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Togo. The other seven countries (Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, Senegal) did not have any ethnobotanical studies published in this data bank. Pharmacological studies have demonstrated some in vitro and/or in vivo activity and
Discussion
Many countries in West Africa have switched their first-line antimalarial drugs, but clinical failure to the newer antimalarial drugs is also occurring at an alarming rate.
Because of the lack of safe and affordable antimalarial drugs, many people in areas where malaria is endemic use natural products (Benoit-Vical, 2005). It is estimated that 80% of the population of many developing countries still use plant-based traditional medicines (Willcox and Bodeker, 2000). A WHO report about traditional
Conclusion
As stated in the Roll Back Malaria project, a new drug needs to be discovered every 5 years. This is unlikely to be achieved because the development of a new drug is costly and time-consuming.
The aim of our review was to report the plants traditionally used in malaria treatment in West Africa and for which antimalarial properties have been already demonstrated by the scientific community. This first step was thus to select plants for which pharmacological studies (in vitro, in vivo and
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge Dr. John Woodley for editing the English of the manuscript, and Mariette Saléry, David Olagnier, and Benoît Witkowski for their fruitful discussions.
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