Traditional Medicine and its Impact on Livelihoods
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24 October 2022
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Interest in nature as a source of potential chemotherapeutic agents continues. Natural products and their derivatives represent more than 50% of all the drugs in clinical use in the world. Higher plants contribute no less than 25% of the total. Since the late 1960s, at least a dozen potent drugs have been derived from flowering plants.With approximately half (125,000) of the world’s plant species living in the tropical rainforests, it is understandable that the tropical rainforests support a vast reservoir of potential drug species. They will continue to provide natural-product chemists with invaluable compounds as starting materials for the development of new drugs. The potential for finding more compounds is enormous, as only about 1% of tropical species have been studied for their pharmaceutical potential. This proportion is even lower for species confined to the tropical rainforests. About 50 drugs have come from tropical plants. The existence of undiscovered pharmaceuticals for modern medicine has often been cited as one of the most important reasons for protecting rainforests, whose extinction rate is a matter of concern (McNeely et al., 1990).