Treating burns with honey

Here, Peter Molan and Julie Betts explain how good Mānuka honey is at treating burns, but it needs to be easy to use before it will be used widely in hospitals, so Peter has made ‘next generation’ Mānuka honey dressings to address the problems of stickiness, runniness and ease of use. Imagine – honey in a huge, flexible roll perfect for wrapping around wounds.

Transcript

Peter Molan (University of Waikato)

There is work going on using honey to protect from radiation burns that people get when they get radiotherapy for cancer. They can be very nasty burns, like very severe sunburn.

Julie Betts (Health Waikato)

There has been some quite good research that shows that honey has a very positive impact on the healing of burns and that’s a huge area.

I think for burns surgeons to get serious about it, we need to have it in a format that they can easily use, and we haven’t got that yet.

So the next generation of honey dressing we will be able to make in a long roll. We will be able to use it like a bandage and wrap up a whole limb.