ABSTRACT

Herbs and spices are parts of plants from indigenous or exotic origin are essential part of human diet as they improve taste, color and aroma of foods (Venugopal et al., 2009). In addition they act as preservatives in many foods; they also have antioxidant (Karuppiah and Rajaram, 2012) and antimicrobial properties (Singh et al., 2008). Herbs have also been utilized in human and veterinary medicine (Alsaid et al., 2010). Garlic belongs to a family of Alliaceae and its scientific name is Allium sativum. Other members of the family include onion, leek, shallot and leek. Garlic is widely used in culinary and medicine (Karuppiah and Rajaram, 2012). It has a pungent hot flavor but mellows and improves with cooking. It has been utilized to fight infections such as cold, cough, asthma, 4 diarrhea, flu, headache, sore throat, abdominal discomfort and respiratory tract infections (Shobana et al., 2009). The antibacterial properties of crushed garlic have been known for a long time. Various garlic preparations have been shown to exhibit a wide spectrum of antibacterial activity against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria including species of Escherichia, Salmonella, Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Klebsiella, Proteus, Bacillus, and Clostridium. Even acid-fast bacteria such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis are sensitive to garlic. Analysis of steam distillations of crushed garlic cloves performed over a century ago showed a variety of allyl Sulfides which are isolated and identified as the component responsible for the remarkable antibacterial activity of crushed garlic cloves. The compound turned out to be an oxygenated sulfur compound which they termed allicin from the Latin name of the garlic plant, A/hum sativum (Rahman, 2001).