Thesis (MTech. degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences)--Tshwane University of Technology, 2009. / Quality control procedures are vital in the pharmaceutical industry to guarantee the authenticity and quality of products. A major challenge in quality assurance of herbal material is the vast variation of active constituents in plants from the same species. As a result of this variation, the selection of only a few compounds as criteria for quality control is inadequate. Pelargonium (P.) sidoides is indigenous to South Africa and highly valued by traditional healers as a remedy to treat coughs, upper respiratory tract irritations and gastrointestinal conditions. An ethanolic extract of P. sidoides is used in the proprietary herbal tincture known as Umckaloabo®. The composition and concentration of polyphenols are parameters which determine the quality of this herbal medicine because it provides several therapeutic benefits in the non-specific medicinal treatment of infectious diseases. Despite the commercial development of P. sidoides very few studies have been conducted to document the full phytochemical range of variation for natural populations and no study has been published on the development of a fast accurate quality control method for the validation of raw material.