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Lucia Keter [1] and Richard Too [2] and Nicholas Mwikwabe [1] and Charles Mutai [1; 3] and Jennifer Orwa [1] and Lizzy Mwamburi [2] and Stanley Ndwigah [4] and Christine Bii [1] and Richard Korir [1]

Academic Editor: Leo Van Griensven

1, Kenya Medical Research Institute, P.O. Box 54840-00200, Nairobi, Kenya, kemri.org

2, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Eldoret, P.O. Box 1125-30100, Eldoret, Kenya, uoeld.ac.ke

3, Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 190-50100, Kakamega, Kenya, mmust.ac.ke

4, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, School of Pharmacy, University of Nairobi, P.O. Box 19676-00202, Nairobi, Kenya, uonbi.ac.ke

Received Mar 22, 2017; Revised Jun 20, 2017; Accepted Jul 6, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

In recent years, there has been a general increase in consumption of herbal products and over the counter (OTC) health foods, nutraceuticals, and medicinal products from plants or other natural sources in developed countries [1]. This increase in the consumption of these herbal products has become a public health issue. Practices of cultivation, harvest, storage, processing, handling, and distribution together with the absence of effective sanitary control measures make natural products subject to a great variety of contamination. Of concern there also is the professionalism of practitioners in terms of quality, efficacy, and safety of their treatment methods and products from herbal and natural sources available in the market [2]. The interest in safety of these products is greatly due to the possible presence of pathogenic bacteria and toxigenic fungi that produce mycotoxins such as aflatoxins, excessive or banned pesticides, microbial contaminants, heavy metals, chemical toxins, or adulteration with conventional drugs [3]. The toxic effects of the aflatoxins include immunosuppressive, mutagenic, teratogenic, and hepatocarcinogenic activity.

A World Health Organization (WHO) survey indicated that about 70–80% of the world populations rely on nonconventional medicine mainly of herbal sources in their primary healthcare [4]. Most consumers and vendors believe and consider herbal products to be safe but microbial contamination in medicinal herbs is a concern, especially among the immunocompromised individuals as a result of their lowered immunity [5]. Medicinal herbal products have been reported to be...
 

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