Medicinal Plants as Anti-infectives: Current Knowledge and New Perspectives

Antimicrobial resistance represents an emerging and urgent threat to human health across the globe. The main cause of this problem is the overuse and inappropriate use of antibiotics in humans, as well as in animals for growth promotion and prophylaxis. Because the cost of bringing a new antibiotic from discovery to the market is high and return on investment is low, many pharmaceutical companies have abandoned their antibiotic discovery and development programs. Therefore, the development of new antimicrobial drugs has slowed dramatically, and there is an urgent need for finding new approaches to filling the antibiotic pipeline. Plants produce a variety of defence compounds, or secondary metabolites, which could be used to meet the needs for new antimicrobials. By providing an overview of the medicinal plants and plant-derived compounds used as antimicrobials as well as the most recent innovations and regulations in the field, Medicinal Plants as Anti-infectives: Current knowledge and New Perspectives will help readers to better appreciate the role of plants and phytomedicines as anti-infectives, to better assess the health benefits of plant-derived products, to help implement new methodologies for studying medicinal plants, and to guide future researches in the field of antimicrobials from plants. This book describes the medicinal plants and plant-derived compounds investigated for their anti-infective properties in different geographic areas and details their current uses as phytomedicines or drugs in their respective health care systems. It provides an overview of the main recent innovations and regulations in the field of drug discovery from ethnobotanical sources. Contributions from experts in each discipline make this book essential in the fields of ethnobotany, phytotherapy, pharmacognosy and phytochemistry.