Multiple Antiviral Activities of Endemic Medicinal Plants Used by Berber Peoples of Morocco.

Good-evening every-one! I hope that you had spent a quiet normal day so far.  Before we start! I just want to apologize for my accent, I know that my English pronunciation is way too far from being good, trust me with that, and actually I have a quiet big article to share with you in a few minutes, so please if I’m moving too fast or you’re just suffering with my bad language, or from a lack of understanding, please let me know that, in order to slow down a bit and give more details and more clarification if needed. With this in mind I think I’ll just start, and please enjoy it.

The article is named: Multiple Antiviral Activities of Endemic Medicinal Plants Used by Berber Peoples of Morocco.

As you know, in our days the major problem that the international government of health have to face. Is the prevalent resistance of micro-organisms to antibiotics and antiviral agents, as you can see in this image, the antibiotic is latterly running away from the bacteria, because he can’t no more do anything against her, as well as the increase in infectious disease (caused by bacteria, viruses or fungi) … this seriously urges us to search and to lock for new medicinal compounds which are novel and more efficient.

So, the obvious and the easy way to do that, is to come back to our mother-nature, and learn from it, especially plants that sometimes have been found to be sources of valuable potential medicines and they still have.

But another problem that we have to solve is how we going to do it with well over 400,000 plant species worldwide, a random screening of plants for compounds with biological activity is doomed to be frustrating and inefficient. As you will see with my friend said he will explain this point to you better than me.  So, the scientist stressed the need for some collection strategy in order to explore this large pool of plants. One of these strategies is the ethnobotanical approach.

In 2001, a group of scientist from the university of British Columbia came her to collaborate with the Institute of Agronomy and Veterinary Hassan II, Rabat. In order to investigate the antiviral activities of some Moroccan plants used traditionally to treat diseases that could be caused by viruses and microbes. Especially plants used by the Berber population. As you know, Diverse biomes occur in Morocco (desert, coast and mountains), and this has resulted in a rich and varied flora with many endemic plants. This local flora has been used traditionally for so many years by Berbers as a source of medicine. But It is very important to point out her the fact that, although the flora and the vegetation of Morocco are well known, only a few studies have been done on traditional medicines and those reasons encouraged them to came and investigate here.

Materials and methods

 Plant collections

The plants were collected in several regions of Morocco during the summers (Atlas & Rif Mountains and Sahara) of 1997–2000. And as the protocol suggest, they were identified, with every voucher specimen kept in the botanical department of booth university, air-dried in the shade, ground, and the powders kept in paper bags until used. And they were very clever in this plant collection, because the plants were selected on the basis of their use by Berber and Arab people to treat infectious diseases as determined in a semi-structured questionnaires and interviews addressed to local Healers and other knowledgeable people. Also, because they didn’t come and asked them directly about anti-viral plants, because the majority of people doesn’t know what is a virus or anti-viral in the first-place, instead of that they asked about symptoms like: flu, could, fever, diarrhea, skin problem. Those symptoms are frequently caused by viruses.    

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