Endangered species news

Medicine and endangered species: World Health Organization

In a statement from World Health Organization, nearly 80 percent of the world’s population depends for its primary health care needs on medicines derived from plants and animals. This is especially true in countries where traditional medicines are widely used. Increasingly, however, modern medicines and remedies also contain animal and plant derivatives. Given growing populations, increasing wealth, and the spreading popularity of natural remedies around the world, the demand for these medicines and remedies is rising. The rising demand, combined with reduced habitat, has caused an alarming increase in the number of plant and animal species (used for medicinal purposes) at risk.

Endangered species

Endangered species is a population of organisms which are at the risk of becoming extinct because these are either very few in number or threatened by changing environment, predation parameters and human intervention. The International Union for Conservation of Nature(IUCN) has calculated the percentage of endangered species as 40 percent of all organisms based on the sample of species that have been evaluated through 2006. Many nations have laws offering protection to the threatened species. But not all the species could make it to the list of threatened species as these are not noticed. Many more species become extinct without gaining public notice.
There are now 41,415 species on the IUCN Red List and 16,306 of them are threatened with extinction, up from 16,118 last year. This includes both endangered animals and endangered plants.

In the last 500 years, human activity is known to have
forced 820 species to extinction (or extinction in the wild).