An Assessment of Bacterial Contamination of Locally Prepared Herbal/Traditional Oral Liquid Medicines Sold in Owino Market

AN ASSESSMENT OF BACTERIAL CONTAMINATION OF LOCALLY PREPARED  HERBAL/TRADITIONAL ORAL LIQUID MEDICINES SOLD IN OWINO MARKET

  Gonsha Rehema, BSC/ED, BPHARM, Mulago Hospital(intern Pharmacist), Gonsharehema@yahoo.co.uk, 0775152851.

Back ground

 It’s estimated that 80% of people worldwide rely on herbal medicines for some part of their primary health care. Despite the benefits, herbal products may be contaminated with contaminants such as microbial agents and heavy metals. It’s therefore important that microbial contamination of herbal preparations, more so oral liquid preparations be assessed. However, the assessment of microbial contamination of herbal oral preparations in Uganda is not yet done by NDA.

Methodology/research design

 Herbal oral liquid preparations locally prepared and sold in Owino market, Kampala were included. Systematically, one bottle of each of five different oral liquid herbal products was purchased. The five products were chosen, based on first got first sampled. From each bottle three aliquot samples were assessed for bacterial contamination by Microscopy, culture techniques, coagulase test, catalyse reactions, oxidase reactions and biochemical methods. The assessments were identification and quantification of bacterial contaminants. The bacteria species assessed were; Salmonella Typhi, Pseudomonas Aeruginosa, Escherichia Coli, Vibrio Cholerae and Staphylococcus aureaus. The observation or measurements were analyzed using Monica Cheesbrough 1998^[3] and the British Pharmacopeia 2007

Results

All the preparations had aerobic bacterial contaminations. In addition to bacterial contamination, these products except Mukisa Cough mixture and Suubi Herbal Mixture had numerous fungi (Candida krusei and Candida glabralata). The organisms isolated were Candida krusei and Candida glabralata, Streptococcus pyogenes, Staphylococcus Epidermidis,  Staphylococci  Saprophyticus, Staphylococcus aureus , Enterobacter,  Escherichia coli,  Citrobacter freundii. 

Conclusion                                                

 One can conclude that these products can adversely affect health status of consumers and are also unstable, since all the five products studied were contaminated with many species and generally had microbial load above the limits specified in the BP 2007

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