THE THERAPEUTIC POTENTIAL OF LANTANA CAMARA LEAF EXTRACT AND ITS POSSIBLE USE IN ANTIBIOTICS RESISTANCE PATHOGENS

ABSTRACT Medicinal plants have been used to relieve illness for over 60,000 years ago, maybe even older. Scripts about medicinal plants from ancient civilizations like Egypt and China show people always sought to use nature to cure their diseases. According to WHO, most of the population worldwide (80%) utilize herbal substances to cure diseases. All the parts of Lantana Camara are traditionally used for treatment of several ailments. Leaves are mostly used as anti-septic, anti-tumor and anti-microbial agents whereas roots are used in the treatment of malaria, rheumatism and skin rashes. The general objective of this study was to investigate the therapeutic potential of Lantana camara leaf extract and its possible use in antibiotics resistance pathogens. Specifically, the objectives were to: Identify the antibacterial activity of Lantana camara leaf and stem, Examine the synergetic activity against bacteria. The test organisms were obtained from Microbiology Laboratory, University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH), Calabar, Nigeria. The isolate was authenticated by standard bacteriological methods. The test organisms were subjected to antimicrobial susceptibility profiling using agar diffusion technique to determine susceptibility and inhibitory concentrations. The results were concentration dependent, having the highest concentration of extract as the most effective in all the plates. For Staphylococcus aureus the highest zone diameter was on 100mg (18mm), For Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the highest zone diameter was on 100mg (12mm), for Klebsella spp the highest zone was on 100mg (13mm and 12mm) for hexane extract, the results show that the most susceptible isolates was Staphylococcus aureus, followed by Klebsella spp. The least susceptible isolates and zone diameter was on the concerntration of 50mg/mLs, 25mg/mLs and 12.5mg/mLs (11mm, 10mm, 9mm, 7mm and 6mm) seen in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Klebsella spp. The control shows zone diameter of 11mm in Augmentin antibiotics for E. coli. The isolates were highly resistant to the antibiotics used for this study. From results obtained with plant extract of 0.2g, it shows that a higher gram of extracts will give a better result.