Chapter Nineteen Fighting the next pandemic: A phytochemical approach from African flora – An overview

Abstract

Management of any pandemic requires a multidimensional approach with a hand from
all players. At every break of a pandemic, there is always no immediate treatment and efforts are
often devoted to social distancing, isolation/quarantine, diagnosis, and care with prospects to
treat but with no clear medication. The approach has always been to permit the body to fight off
the pandemic by boosting its immune system through selective diet and or food supplements as
external immune boosters in addition to arresting symptoms. With the exception of COVID-19,
the burden of HIV epidemic and seasonal flu pandemics, infectious disease outbreaks have
mostly devastated developing societies. The use of herbal remedies to cure several kinds of human
diseases has a long history in Africa. Various plant parts are used to prevent, dispel symptoms
or regress deformities to normal. A portion of the pharmaceutical products currently being
prescribed by physicians including opium, aspirin, digitalis, paclitaxel, docetaxel, vinblastine,
vincristine, quinine, and artemisinin have a historic use as herbal remedies. African medicinal
plants are rich in such natural bioactive metabolites with therapeutic values against several
diseases including deadly fevers. The therapeutic properties of these metabolites are a factor
of the type and amount of alkaloids, phenolics, flavonoids, quinones, saponins, and terpenes
contained. Human ingestion of these bioactive trigger pharmacological effects like antiviral,
anti-inflammatory, analgesic, antidiabetic, antimicrobial, anti-parasitic, and antioxidant effects,
thereby arresting the causal or symptomatic effects manifested in the pandemics. Ethnomedical
and phytochemical studies on the African medicinal plants have led to the isolation of
promising antiviral, anti-inflammatory, anti-parasitic, analgesic, and antimicrobial metabolites.
Our discussion in this chapter is premised on challenging Africans Scientists (ethnobotanists,
phytochemists, microbiologists, and pharmacologists) to collaboratively intensify the search
for phytochemicals as drug leads and explore options for developing these leads into functional
medicines for the various diseases/pandemics devastating the continent.