Manuka

Book excerpt: New Zealand's manuka honey is known around the world. It fetches extremely high prices, and beekeepers do everything in their power to produce as much of it as they can. Wound dressings containing manuka honey are used in leading hospitals, and it has saved the lives of patients infected with disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to standard antibiotic drugs. In so doing, it has forced the medical profession to re-think its position on the therapeutic properties of natural products. This book chronicles the remarkable 'rags-to-riches' story of manuka honey, as seen through the eyes of a beekeeping specialist who watched it unfold from the very beginning. It's a great science tale of an unassuming university lecturer and his hardworking lab assistant who found something totally unexpected in a product everyone had written off. And it's an entertaining account of the way that simple discovery magically caught the international media's attention, helping some enterprising New Zealanders with a love of bees to develop manuka honey-based products and take them to the rest of the world. The book describes the remarkable antibacterial and therapeutic properties of manuka and the range of uses it has.