10-10-2004, 01:11 AM
Asalaam Alaikum ,
These are some interesting facts about honey.
Copied from book "Nature's Super 7 Medicines"
Infection:
Probably next to garlic, honey is one of the strongest antibacterial
agents found in nature . To show you just how effective honey can be
against infection, I'm going to take a slightly different approach
from one the reader might expect.
To start with, bees are clean little creatures.If they are killed and
dipped in a culture medium of any kind, bacteria seldom grow in it.
Some years ago a scientist, W.G. Sackett, anxiously noticed that
honeybees were crawling "over the human excrement of the family
privy" in Tennessee somewhere. He tested the maximum survival time of
bacteria in honey, using bacteria of the typhoid-colon group. Much to
his relief, he found that all the bacteria were killed within hours
or days.He published the demise times of the various intestinal
bacteria in an article that appeared in The Agricultural Experiment
Station of the Colorado Agricultural College Bulletin 252 (Fort
Collins, CO: 1919;pp.3-18)
B. dysenteriae 10 hours
B. paratyphosus A 10 hours
B. paratyphosus B 10 hours- 1 day
B. typhosus 10 hours-2 days
B. proteus vulgaris 3-4 days
B. coli communis 4-5 days
The honey was heat-sterilized, inoculated with the bacteria, and then
kept at room temperature (under these conditions the bactericidal
activity is due mainly to the osmotic effect). The addition of 10%
saline solution to the honey often increased its effect.
This somewhat off-the-wall evidence plainly demonstrates that honey
doesn't support bacterial groeth; if this were not so, the bees would
have a hard time of it, and many housewives too. Honey is
antibacterial for several reasons. The most obvious is a simple
concentration effect: being extremely hypertonic, honey draws water
from the bacterial cells, causing them to shrivel and die. This
mechanism works so well that an offering of honey, piously buried in
the ancient city of Paestum in Southern Italy a sacret chamber 2,500
years ago, never decayed and is still recognizable to this day.
Check out the research section on this site :
http://www.honeylocator.com/
Free HoneyBee program or info download here:
http://www.bees-online.com/Download.htm
Peace and Blessings ,
Fatima
