Honey is more effective in treating difficult-to-heal wounds than antibiotics, says Jennifer Eddy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Even methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the so-called flesh eating bacterium is no match for the antibiotic compounds the bees manufacture for us - for free.

Image credit: Graham Soult

Meanwhile, antibiotics are losing much of their appeal as many common bacteria develop resistance. Chickens are fed grains mixed with antibiotics, calves and pigs are routinely injected as a "precaution". Pharmaceutical companies are pushing antibiotics as the solution to all health problems in animal husbandry. We eat the residues of these antibiotics in many of our foods, and of course bacteria, being exposed to the drugs at every turn, find ways to resist their deadly properties.

That resistance is getting more and more problematic as hospitals become a breeding ground for infections.

Not only wounds are healed by honey, apparently there are also anti-viral properties in honey. Here is an anecdote from the time of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic:

"During the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, my dad was a little boy, 8 years old, in Stockton, California. His dad was a beekeeper, and kept some filled honeycombs in a closet in the house.

During the epidemic, the family members would go into that closet and eat some of the fresh honey every day, whenever they wanted.

The flu decimated the population of Stockton, including the families of their neighbors. Next door, only one little boy survived, and when he came out of the house, they couldn't recognize him, he was so emaciated. Other whole families were entirely wiped out. They piled corpses in the streets, as there weren't enough healthy men to bury them.

Dad's (large) family escaped the flu intact. It skipped their house completely. Dad always said he thought it was something in the honey they ate that protected them.

He may have been right. I recently read that they've discovered that honey has a compound that turns into something like hydrogen peroxide inside you. For whatever it's worth, this gives some protection from viruses."

Honey could also save limbs that might otherwise need to be amputated, as our standard medical treatments fail. Here is the article in Wired which provided the stimulus for this post:

- - -

Honey Remedy Could Save Limbs

Oct, 11, 2006
(original article here)

When Jennifer Eddy first saw an ulcer on the left foot of her patient, an elderly diabetic man, it was pink and quarter-sized. Fourteen months later, drug-resistant bacteria had made it an unrecognizable black mess.

Doctors tried everything they knew -- and failed. After five hospitalizations, four surgeries and regimens of antibiotics, the man had lost two toes. Doctors wanted to remove his entire foot.