Pharmaceutica Analytica Acta

Abstract

Emergence of Herbal Antimicrobial Drug Resistance in Clinical Bacterial Isolates

Prasanna Vadhana, Bhoj R Singh, Monika Bharadwaj and Shiv Varan Singh

Alternative medicines have been practiced for centuries and remained as integral part of many civilizations around the globe. One important aspect of alternative medicine includes herbal medicines/drugs in which locally available plants or its parts are used in treating ailments. Herbal medicines are commonly used for treating both infectious and non-infectious diseases. On the other hand, Antimicrobials used to treat bacterial infections caused by multiple drug resistant (MDR) and total drug resistant (TDR) strains are becoming more common in the clinical setting and world is looking for alternative therapies to treat such infections. Herbal medicines are anticipated to protect us from infections as they are considered as better alternatives for existing and emerging antimicrobial drug resistant (ADR) pathogens. Herbal antimicrobials acts either by killing or restricting the bacterial growth through parallel mechanisms as antibiotics similarly there could be mechanisms of herbal drug resistance just like antibiotic resistance in microbes. However, lack of systematic and standard data on herbal antimicrobial activity neither we could understand the extent of herbal drug resistance nor the mechanism of resistance in microbes. The recent studies on antimicrobial properties of herbal drugs on clinical isolates indicated that there is some insensitivity or resistance in microbes towards some common herbal antimicrobial compounds. This review focuses on recent reports of herbal drug resistance among pathogenic microbes (clinical bacterial isolates) against herbal drugs.