Professor Peter Molan, Honey Research Unit, University of Waikato in New
Zealand, looks at the use of manuka honey as a medicine.
Honey has been used for thousands of years to treat wounds, gastroenteritis and
eye infections. It was displaced from common usage by the advent of antibiotics
in the 1940s.
But now that the widespread and rapidly increasing resistance of
microbes to antibiotics has become a major global threat to health, there has
been a renaissance in the use of honey to treat infections.
The ancient physicians were aware that some honeys were better than others for
treating infections, but this ancient wisdom has survived only in folk
medicine.
It was through scientific investigation following up such folk
knowledge in New Zealand that manuka honey was discovered to have a unique
anti-microbial component additional to the enzymically produced hydrogen
peroxide that is responsible for the anti-microbial activity of all honey.
This
unique anti-microbial activity is of extremely broad spectrum and is equally as
effective against antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria as it is against
other strains.
Also, unlike other topical anti-microbial agents used on wounds,
manuka honey does not slow the healing process by having adverse effects on the
exposed wound tissue.
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