Pakissan.com; Dewormers of Plant Origin

Dewormers of Plant Origin - A Scientific Evidence
Muhammad Lateef and Zafar Iqbal
Department of Veterinary Parasitology,
University of Agriculture, Faisalabad-38040, PAKISTAN

(This article has been extracted from the Ph.D. Thesis of the first author)

Sheep plays an important role in the national economy of Pakistan. The major share of national sheep population comes from the small flocks maintained by the landless families or small land holders in the villages. These sheep flocks are the main stay of the livelihood of these people. They sell sheep to meet their day-to-day needs of life.

There are no permanent pastures for sheep and, therefore, flocks are grazed on canal banks, roadsides and crop residues in the fields. The animals usually remain under-fed and victim of diseases. The bacterial and viral diseases come as outbreak and result in huge mortality, if proper therapy is not instituted at proper time. Worms, however, are the permanent parasites and their prevalence has been reported very high throughout Pakistan.

The gastrointestinal roundworms carry high importance because of their insidious and severe pathological effects. They lead to lowered productivity, retarded growth rate and even death of lambs. There are a number of factors that influence the prevalence of gastrointestinal roundworms. These include age, sex, breed of the animals, weather conditions and husbandry/management practices.

The Livestock and Dairy Development Department of the Government partially provides health care to these animals. The sheep owners, therefore, have to rely on the ethno-veterinary medicinal practices being inherited by their predecessors generation to generation. Moreover, failure and/or reduced efficacy of some chemicals (due to a variety of reasons like development of resistance) for deworming purposes has led the farmers to heavily rely on their traditional knowledge.

However, the traditionally used plants are not fully backed by the scientific evidence for their efficacy as dewormers. Therefore, it would be worth to focus research on the alternates to the commercially available dewormers.

A research was, therefore, conducted to evaluation the deworming activity of some indigenous plants commonly used in the ethno-veterinary system of Pakistan. The main criterion for such an activity was reduction in the number of eggs passed in faeces of sheep after treatment. For this purpose, 10 plants were tested for their deworming efficacy in sheep.

These plants included Adhatoda vesica (arusa), Artemisia brevifolia (afsanteen), Butea monosperma (Dhak), Calotropis gigantean (aak), Carum copticum (ajwain), Azadirachta indica (neem), Nicotiana tabacum (tambaku), Swertia chirata (chirata), Vernonia anthelmintica (kali zeeri) and Zingiber officinale (adrak).

All these plants were found to possess varying deworming activity. Although some of these plants were more than 80% effective, yet none of them was at par with levamisole, a commercially available dewormer. But, keeping in view the ready availability, lesser cost of plants and already in use; the sheep farmers were recommended to use these plants as dewormers with the following priority:

Name of plant, dose and form recommended		Per cent efficacy
1	Butea monosperma seeds crude powder @3g	80.7
2	Carum copticum seeds crude powder @3g	78.1
3	Calotropis gigantea stem bark crude powder @3g	77.8
4	Artemisia brevifolia flowers crude powder @3g	62.1
5	Swertia chirata leaves crude powder @3g	59
6	Nicotiana tabacum leaves crude powder @3g	58.3
7	Vernonia anthelmintica seeds crude powder @3g	56.9

It is recommended that further research on large scale be carried out on animals for identification of active principles, standardization of dose and toxicity studies for drug development. In addition to this, large number of samples of the same plant from different geographic areas be subjected to experimentation keeping in view the possibility of differences in chemical composition of the same plant having different soil.