Plants were once a primary source of all the medicines in the world and they still continue to provide mankind with new remedies. Natural products and their derivates represent more than 50% of all drugs in clinical use in the world. Higher plants contribute no less than 25% to the total. Well-known examples of plant-derived medicines include quinine, morphine, codeine, aspirine, atropine, reserpine and cocaine. Recently, important new anti-cancer drugs such as taxol (Taxus spp) and vincristine (Catharanthus roseus) have been developed. In South Africa, a large part of the day-to-day medicine is still derived from plants and large volumes of plants or their extracts are sold in the informal and commercial sectors of the economy. South Africa's contribution to world medicine includes Cape aloes (Aloe ferox), buchu (Agathosma betulina) and devils claw (Harpagophytum procumbrens), but local equivalents exist for many of the famous remedies used elsewhere. There is a growing interest in natural and traditional medicines as a source of new commercial products. Medicinal plants are somthing of the future, not of the past!
(by Ben-Eric Van Wyk from Medicinal Plants of South Africa)
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