Dr P J Houghton Dr Houghton also has a departmental home page . Plants used in traditional medicine for the treatment of virus-related diseases often show antiviral activity when their extracts are tested.
Many plants remain to be investigated.
Crude plant extracts are first tested and then fractionated. There is also a need to discover new antibacterial and antifungal agents because of the increase in multidrug-resistant strains and the danger of infection in immunocompromised patients. Projects will consist of the testing of crude extracts for activity followed by the isolation of compounds from fractions showing activity and the subsequent structural determination of the constituents responsible. In several parts of the work there are plants used in traditional medicine for the treatment of snakebite and scorpion stings. Most of these have not been tested scientifically to validate such claims.