Int. J. One Health Vol.5 Article-13

Potential of medicinal plants to treat dengue

Background and Aim: Dengue is a major public health challenge worldwide, particularly in tropical areas. Nearly 390 million infections and 22,000 deaths occur every year. At present, there are no specific therapeutics available to treat dengue; however, possible treatment procedures are explained in the traditional medical systems (TMSs), such as Sri Lankan TMS, Indian Ayurvedic, Unani, and Siddha TMS. In these TMSs, medicinal plants have been used in several ways against dengue, such as virocides, larvicides, and mosquito repellents. Therefore, medicinal plants inherit biologically active compounds/lead compounds that are yet to be identified chemically and physiologically. Herein, we discuss the possible applications of crude plant extracts and isolated phytochemicals from medicinal plants such as quercetin, sulfated galactomannans, flavonoids, and glabranine in controlling dengue. Moreover, medicinal plant-based therapeutics can be safer, cost-effective, and non-toxic. Therefore, this paper reviews the medicinal plants that are used in TMSs to manage dengue, the phytochemicals they contain, and mode of action of these phytochemicals such as virocides, larvicides, and mosquito repellents.

Keywords: dengue, in silico, larvicides, phytochemicals, virocides.

How to cite this article: Neelawala D, Rajapakse S, Kumbukgolla WW. Potential of medicinal plants to treat dengue. Int J One Health 2019;5:86-91.

Received: 13-03-2019  Accepted: 05-08-2019    Published online: 08-10-2019

Corresponding author: Dulanjalee Neelawala   E-mail: dulanjaleen1@gmail.com

DOI: 10.14202/IJOH.2019.86-91

Copyright: Neelawala, et al. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.