eChapter Name: Nutritional, Therapeutic and Medicinal Properties of Moringa oleifera An Overview of Promising Healer
9789389571912
eBook Name: MEDICINAL AND AROMATIC PLANTS UTILIZATION AND CONSERVATION
by Amit Kumar Pal, Chandan Sengupta
1. Introduction
Medicinal plants are used to be the valuable sources of new drugs (Nalawade et al., 2003; Chen et al., 2010;Chacko et al., 2010; Hamilton 2004). In Europe, about 1300 plants were used as medicinal plant, of which 90% are collected from wild resources. In United States, about 118 out of 150 prescribed drugs made up of natural sources (Balunas and Kinghorn 2005)
Moreover in developing countries, about 80 % people are totally reliant on herbal drugs and over 25 % of prescribed medicines derivative from wild plant species (Hamilton 2004). With the increasing demand for herbal drugs, natural health products, and secondary metabolites of medicinal plants, the use of medicinal plants is growing rapidly throughout the world (Nalawade et al., 2003). Between 50,000 and 80,000 flowering plant species are using for medicinal purposes worldwide according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund (Bentley 2010). However, 20 % of the wild resources have already been exhausted with the increasing human population (Ross, 2005). Worldwide loss of species and habitat destruction has increased the extinction rate of medicinal plants, especially in China (Nalawade et al., 2003; Heywood and Iriondo, 2003), India (Heywood and Iriondo, 2003; Hamilton, 2008), Nepal (Hamilton, 2008), Kenya (Hamilton, 2008), Uganda (Zerabruk and Yirga, 2012) and Tanzania (Zerabruk and Yirga, 2012). China and India used highest numbers of medicinal plants i.e. 11,146 and 7500 species respectively (Rafieian-Kopaei, 2013). So, it is now necessary to find out new medicinally important plants or to utilize the well known medicinal plant sustainably. There are many plants in India that contains different medicinal and nutritional components, which can be exploited much more efficiently to establish a new era of medical science.