Abstract
Tuberculosis (TB) remains a disease of global importance with approximately two million deaths annually worldwide. Effective treatment of TB has been hampered by the emergence of drug resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The global resurgence of TB and the development of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), call for the development of new anti-tuberculosis drugs to combat this disease. Plant natural products have a proven global history of treating diseases and ailments. This review aims to provide a situation report of on-going global efforts to discover and develop anti-TB drugs from plants, including plants found within Nigeria’s rich flora. For two decades, studies on different families and genera of the plant kingdom have shown the great potential of plants as antimycobacterial agents. These motifs, including those from within Nigeria’s flora, are discussed. Chemists, biochemists and molecular biologists have also employed technological developments in separation methods, hyphenated techniques, high throughput assays and microarray analysis, to drive the drug discovery process. Nigeria, and indeed, Africa, needs to look inwards to solve the burden of tuberculosis, by tapping on its rich biodiversity, which the continent is endowed with. There is need for the government to be committed and actively fund anti-tuberculosis research. Key words: Plant natural product, antimycobacterial activity, drug discovery, drug development, Nigerian flora, biodiversity.
Highlights
Tuberculosis (TB) has continued to be a major health concern all over the world being the leading cause of death from any single infectious agent
Despite the implementation of this strategy, the incidence, prevalence and mortality rates of TB in Africa have continued to be on the increase, and this trend was forecast to continue to 2015 (Dye et al, 2005)
Launched the new “Stop TB Strategy”, a 10 year plan for the control of TB (WHO, 2006), but the core of the strategy remained directly observed treatment short course (DOTS) in essence
Summary
Tuberculosis (TB) has continued to be a major health concern all over the world being the leading cause of death from any single infectious agent. Nigeria remains one of twenty-two high TB burden countries around the world. As a measure to tackle this global public health problem, the WHO came up, in 1995, with a standardized control strategy called directly observed treatment short course (DOTS), endorsed by the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases (IUATL), to detect and cure TB (WHO, 1996). Co-infection of HIV with TB has challenged DOTS as a sole TB control strategy for Africa (Corbett et al., 2006; De Cock and Chaisson, 1999). In 2006, the WHO launched the new “Stop TB Strategy”, a 10 year plan for the control of TB (WHO, 2006), but the core of the strategy remained DOTS in essence. In Nigeria, the DOTS programme has been implemented in all states and local government areas in the country and 3,000
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