a review on in vitro and in vivo studies on medicinal plants extracts effectivity on gastrointestinal parasites in small ruminants

Gastrointestinal helminthiases mostly include nematodes and trematodes (flukes) of ruminant animals have increasingly become an important focus of research attention. measures aimed at preventing clinical parasitic gastroenteritis generally attempt to avoid exposure of susceptible stock to heavily contaminated pasture during the latter part of the grazing season. this may be achieved by the strategic use of anthelmintics or grazing control, or both. anthelmintic resistance is defined as a decrease in the efficacy of an anthelmintic against a population of parasites that is generally susceptible to that drug. the problem of anthelmintic resistance in gastrointestinal parasites of small ruminants is worldwide. herbal medicines could probably be a good alternative to the current pharmaceutical compounds used in the market, to which drug resistance is increasing every day. to write an outline of materials and methods in this review study, online databases (google scholar, pubmed, scopus, and sciencedirect) were searched and published research articles (1992–2024) were gathered and reviewed. overall, what we can learn from the studies results, is that herbal medicine’s mechanism of action is not fully understood; if an analysis is performed to fill this hole, they would be able to suggest nontoxic and effective dosage determination methods, drug preservation, and value addition. perhaps it is time for more research to be conducted on the use of medicinal plants and recognizing their pros and cons in the treatment of important diseases such as gastrointestinal helminth infections in small ruminants, so they can be officially used as new generation drugs in the treatment of these diseases before drug resistance to current commercial anthelminthic drugs reaches a point where they become useless.