Background: Herbal medicine is widely used for prevention and treatment of diseases worldwide including Palestine and may require long term usage. The level of some heavy metals and microbial contaminants in some of these medicinal plant consumed by Palestinians were studied in order to evaluate their quality.

Methodology: The level of metals like Zinc, Cadmium, Lead and Copper were quantified by atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry. Moreover, the bacterial and fungal contamination was determined for the dried powdered of the selected plants. All of our procedures are done under USP technique.

Result: The result of the heavy metals showed that  copper and cadmium were above the allowable limits in all the tested plant. And zinc  metal was above the allowable limit in  78.9% of the tested samples. The microbiological results of the tested plants revealed that 63.2% of it was contaminated by bacteria, & 89.5% contaminated by yeast.

Conclusion: Herbal used in the Palestinian markets doesn’t meet the international requirement of heavy metal and microbiological limits. Thus an urgent action has to be taken by the responsible such as implementing importation and registration requirements and performing regular quality check of sold and imported herbal.

Conference Title

held in Bethlehem 12-14, 2018

Conference Country

Palestine

Conference Date

Sept. 12, 2018 - Sept. 14, 2018

Conference Sponsor

Palestinian pharmacy association