Honey Dressing Wound Care Part II

In a correspondence with Professor John E. Moore of Northern Ireland's Public Health Laboratory regarding his MRSA/honey publication, he mentioned two important factors to consider when using honey for wound dressings:

Patients should use only medical-grade and not honey plucked off the shelf in their nearest food store. This is not a tactic to boost Big Pharma profits, but a very necessary step to avoid potential infection from dormant bacteria in foodgrade honey. Such honey is not sterile but may contain many spore-forming organisms, which is not a good idea to apply to a wound. The medical grade honey is sterilized to wipe out such bacterial contaminants.

Infant botulism: One spore-forming contaminant may be Clostridium botulinum. Therefore newborns and young children should avoid ingesting natural honey to avoid getting infant botulism. There may be a temptation for young children to “taste the cure”.

Cheers to Professor Moore for bringing this fascinating topic to us -see previous post for full story.