A Review of Trends in Herbal Drugs Standardization, Regulation and Integration to the National Healthcare Systems in Kenya and the Globe

Herbal medicines contribute to the provision of primary healthcare to millions of people in the world today. With increasing disease burden, there is proportionate increase in demand for those medicines with ethnobotanical evidence of efficacy against communicable and noncommunicable diseases. Because of availability, acceptability and affordability, herbs along with other forms of complementary and alternative medicines have the potential to fulfill the need for universal health coverage as envisaged by world health organization. In this paper, we review the status of herbal medicine use in Kenya and selected countries with a view to highlighting the reasons why some countries have been able to integrate while others have not. There is a general observation that those countries that have been able to define measures for quality assurance and standardization have integrated herbal medicines to their mainstream healthcare systems and have well defined regulatory systems. We conclude that quality remains a challenge and suggest possible approaches for quality control as recommended by WHO. There is a further urgent need to formulate quality assurance mechanisms for highly utilized medicinal products especially for African countries who heavily rely on these forms of medicines for their primary healthcare.