Plants Used for Antimalaria Treatment by the Baka in Eastern and Southern Cameroon

Abstract

Malaria is nowadays recognized as one of the most deadly diseases in the world. Due to the increasing resistance of malaria protozoans to conventional drugs, traditional herbal medicine appears to be a possible solution. The present work aims at describing the knowledge of antimalarial treatment by the Baka people. Ethnobotanical surveys were conducted from January 24, 2019, to January 25, 2021, among 207 Baka informants in the East and South Regions of Cameroon. A total of 925 citations and 204 recipes were recorded, involving 119 plant species, distributed in 108 genera and 45 families. The most cited families were Apocynaceae, Annonaceae, and Solanaceae. Remedies were predominantly made from stem bark of plants (68.1％ of the total citations) and prepared by boiling (46.6％ of the total citations). Based on the use agreement value (UAV) and spatial use convergence (SUC), uses of Alstonia boonei, Capsicum frutescens, Picralima nitida, Annickia affinis, Drypetes gossweileri, Diospyros crassiflora, and Cylicodiscus gabunensis, for antimalarial treatment were prevalent in the study sites. However, 98 species out of 119 were cited only by five informants or less out of 207, and 51 species were cited only by one informant. These results suggest that the Baka share major medicinal plants for antimalarial treatment on the one hand, and individuals are always attempting new plants for the treatment on the other hand.