[Doczilla]

Getting to this thread a little late, but I've been browsing.

Honey contains spores of clostridium botulinum, which is the bacteria that causes botulism. The reason that you can't have babies around honey is that the babies do not have the necessary defenses (stomach acid, proteinases) in their digestive tract to destroy the spores. The spores, once ingested, get into that warm wet environment and give rise to vegetative bacteria, which produce the toxin which causes paralysis. Adults don't get botulism from honey because our defenses are adequate to destroy the spores.

I took care of a baby once with infantile botulism that hadn't been fed any honey. The family members harvested and canned honey, and after thorough investigation we concluded that contamination from the honey process had gotten on the family's clothes or skin, and the child had ingested it. The potential for accidental ingestion is one reason that honey should not be used for wound healing on babies.

The risk of wound botulism is there, not just in children but potentially in adults as well, if regular honey is used. Wounds may not have adequate immune defenses to prevent growth of c. botulinum and resulting toxin production. The idea behind medical grade honey is that it has been sterilized to destroy the spores.


'zilla