Honey used for seals – Pet Corner - The Press Democrat - Santa .

This submission has small to do with pets, unless a huge elephant seal is your mind of a pet, but what it is, is how we can hit upon ways to help creatures in need. The folk at the Marine Mammal Meat in Marin County have been trying something old to accelerate the healing of wounds suffered by seals and sea lions, who fall into the center. This is from Dr.

Bill Van Bonn, a veterinarian on faculty at the center:

"Gupta" a weaner male Elephant seal that presented on 4 OCT 2010 with a massive shark bite wound to the left chest and axilla. The shark must have seed from below-left and must have had a decent support of "Gupta" for a minute or so. The wounds consist of major soft tissue loss over much of the remaining slope of the chest, multiple lacerations and multiple puncture wounds in the left `armpit`. At our initial evaluation we sedated the animal, took some radiographs and thoroughly evaluated the wounds. The serious news- no vital structures were damaged. The thorax wall is intact and there is no show of joint involvement. The bad word is the massive soft tissue trauma left a lot of bark and muscle without a blood supply and it was in diverse stages of death when we first looked at the animal. The injury was infected and infested with fly larvae (maggots) pretty gross in all respects. So we were faced with devising a program for open wound treatment- aggressive topical cleansing, removal of dead tissue and diligence of some kind of antimicrobial, antiseptic ointment. That`s when we thought of honey.

Honey is being exploited for its curative properties at the Marine Mammal Center.

Honey has gained recent popularity in both man and veterinary medicine as a wound treatment due mostly to its natural therapeutic properties. It has very high sugar content and as a result binds water molecules strongly. That gets the water unavailable to organisms trying to make a life in the area. This is why honey can be safely stored on the shelf without refrigeration and does not spoil like milk. Honey also contains a sort of compounds that may raise the tissue response to infection and inflammation. It`s relatively cheap [in fact much less expensive than most topical antibiotic ointments and evidence suggests it is only as effective. So we decided to try. Every other day or so we've been cleaning up the injury and applying a generous layer of love to it.

Gupta, an elephant seal, is swathed with love to aid the healing after a shark attack.

Now - I am not certain if it is the love or shadow of time, could be either or both, but "Gupta`s" wounds are healing quite nicely indeed! The creature is off all antibiotics and if things proceed at this pace he`ll be capable to go national in no time!

Gupta was released back into the wilderness in late October.

Links:

Marine Mammal Center

Some data on the healing property of honey.

National Institutes of Health