How sugar heals wounds resistant to antibiotics – Study

With concerns about antibiotics resistance growing by the day, the experience of a father, Moses Murandu and laboratory studies suggest that something cheaper and available around us could help heal wounds and that is sugar.

The journey to this finding began while Murandu was growing up as a child in poverty in the rural Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. Moses Murandu was used to having salt, the story published in BBC Future said, and literally rubbed in his wounds when he fell and cut himself. On lucky days, though, his father had enough money to buy something which stung the boy much less than salt: sugar.

Murandu now a senior lecturer in adult nursing at the University of Wolverhampton always noticed that sugar seemed to help heal wounds more quickly than no treatment at all. So he was surprised when, having been recruited to come to work as a nurse for the UK’s National Health System (NHS) in 1997, he found that sugar wasn’t being used in any official capacity. He decided to try to change that.

His idea is finally being taken seriously and he has completed an initial pilot study focused on sugar’s applications in wound healing and won an award from the Journal of Wound Care in March 2018 for his work.

This procedure could be very important in some parts of the world where people cannot afford antibiotics.

According Murandu to treat a wound with sugar, all you do is pour the sugar on the wound and apply a bandage on top. “The granules soak up any moisture that allows bacteria to thrive. Without the bacteria, the wound heals more quickly.”

Evidence for all of this was found in Murandu’s trials in the lab. And a growing collection of case studies from around the world has supported Murandu’s findings, including examples of successful sugar treatments on wounds resistant to antibiotics.

The sugar Murandu uses is the plain, granulated type you might use to sweeten your tea. In in vitro trials, he found that there was no difference between using cane or beet sugar. Demerara, however, wasn’t as effective.

In total, Murandu has now carried out clinical studies on 41 patients in the United Kingdom. He hasn’t yet published the trial results but has presented them at national and international conferences.

One question he had to answer during his research was whether sugar could be used on diabetic patients, who commonly have leg and foot ulcers. Diabetics need to control the level of glucose in their blood so this isn’t an obvious healing method to use on them.

But he found that it worked for diabetics without sending their glucose levels soaring. “Sugar is sucrose - you need the enzyme sucrase to convert that into glucose,” he says.

While Murandu continues his research on human patients, across the Atlantic US veterinarian Maureen McMichael has been using this healing method on animals for years and that she had recorded great successes with it.