A plant which has active constituents of medicinal properties and is used to treat disease/illness in different systems of medicine or traditionally used for the treatment of disease/illness is considered as medicinal plant. Plants have been used as medicines from the ancient time. Medicinal plants are widely and successfully used on every continent. In Asia, the practice of herbal medicine is extremely well established and documented.
As a result, most of the medicinal plants that have international recognition come from this region. Plants, plant parts and plant products served as the materials for the preparation of medicine and these medicinal plants and plant parts constitute an important natural wealth of a country. They play a significant role in primary health care service to rural people.
Indigenous knowledge of herbal medicine for the cure of several types of diseases/illness exists among different communities of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is endowed with vast resources of medicinal plants. About five thousands of angiospermic species have been estimated to found in Bangladesh. Many of them considered as medicinal plants. Some of them have been explored, but most of them remain unexplored. Unfortunately, there is a lack of systematic efforts to explore and exploit this valuable potential except some sporadic attempts by a few institutions.
All the information about medicinal plants is found scattered in different books and journals. This database attempted to compile all the scattered data of medicinal plants of Bangladesh published in different publications in home and abroad. A database of Medicinal Plants of Bangladesh has been created by Dr. Shaikh Bokhtear Uddin. He is responsible for organize and administrate the database. Dr. Uddin compiled all the data in collaboration with Dr. Mohammed Yusuf, former Director, BCSIR Laboratories Chittagong. Dr. Mostafa Kamal Pasha, Professor of Botany, Chittagong University is continuously engaged with his valuable suggestions to create this database. Presently the database consists of more than 900 medicinal plants of Bangladesh.
Plant details includes the authentic Taxonomic Information,Vernacular/Bangla name, Tribal and English name, Family, Description of the Plant, Photograph, Chemical Constituents, Uses and Distribution of the species in Bangladesh. MPBD also contain Dictionaries of Botanical andPharmacological terms.
Information is easily entered, copied, and manipulated using standard Operating System (OS), commands and menus. Currently this online MPBD database can be accessed on multiple platforms. This database aims to create opportunities for researcher and students from different disciplines such as Botany, Zoology, Pharmacology, Pharmacognosy, Microbiology, and different herbal medicine industries to easily access, retrieve data and as a suitable tool for identification of plants. A plan for regular update and enrich this database has been made.
The administrator is responsible for quality and integrity of the information. The database licensed to Dr. Shaikh Bokhtear Uddin, Ethnobotany & Pharmacognosy Laboratory, Department of Botany, University of Chittagong.
