Folk medicine has long used honey to treat many diseases. In many cough remedies and home remedies, honey is often involved. People often combine it with pear, white radish, lily, and other ingredients that also have lung moistening effects to create various therapeutic diets.
Honey does indeed have excellent lung moistening and cough suppressing effects, but it should be used with caution for infants and young children.
This is because honey is a sweet, viscous liquid that worker bees collect from plants as nectar and store in the beehive after fermentation.
However, honey is highly susceptible to contamination by Clostridium botulinum, a bacterium that is resistant to both extreme cold and high temperatures and is not easily inactivated.
Therefore, even honey that has undergone general processing still contains a certain amount of Clostridium botulinum spores. These spores have little effect on adults because adults have strong immune systems and the spores cannot grow, reproduce, or release toxins in the body.
However, once Clostridium botulinum spores enter the body of an infant or young child, they rapidly develop into Clostridium botulinum bacteria and release large amounts of highly toxic botulinum toxin, which can affect the health of the infant or young child.
According to relevant data, an excess of botulinum toxin can be fatal for infants under one year old. Therefore, infants and young children should be careful when using honey and it is best to avoid taking it.
