Dutch researchers tested the properties of medical-grade honey on bacteria such as Bacillus subtilis, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterococcus faecium. They found that honey eliminated all the bacteria. The study was published in the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
Honey is not only an effective antibacterial; it also contains elements such as microbicides defensin-1. It is a substance that is part of the bees’ immune system and which they add to honey.
"We’ve known for millennia that honey can be good for what ails us, but we haven’t known how it works. Now that we’ve extracted a potent antibacterial ingredient from honey, we can make it still more effective and take the sting out of bacterial infections," says FASEB journal editor-in-chief Gerald Weissmann.
Medical-grade honey is a bit different from regular honey and is totally sterile. For the last few years, it has been added to some products, including antibacterial soaps.