Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medical Research

In Ghana, majority of the populace use herbal medicines for the treatment of typhoid. Though these herbal medications are widely acclaimed to be effective, there is a lack of validation of their efficacy with little or no information on the susceptibility patterns of the prevalent Salmonella enterica serovars to the numerous herbal medicines used for treating typhoid fever on the Ghanaian market. This research therefore investigates 16 anti-typhoidal herbal medicinal preparations for sale in the Ghanaian market and determines their activities against S. typhi, S. enteriditis, S. paratyphi, S. havana and S. arizona in the agar well diffusion assay. This study also screened the preparations for the presence of chloramphenicol by HPLC-UV analysis. Results showed that 38% of the herbal preparations sampled were active against all the five strains of Salmonella, 13% against three strains, 19% against 2 strains, 4% against 1 strain and 25% showed no activity against any of the tested strains. We concluded that 70% of the anti-typhoidal preparations were active against 2 to 5 strains of Salmonella and hence might be effective in the treatment of most typhoid infection due to its broad spectrum of activity. No extraneous chloramphenicol was detected to be present in the preparations.