Commonly known by the name Botox, botulinum toxin is literally the king of all poisons. It is the most toxic substance, natural or synthetic, ever identified. It is so potent that its LD50 value of just one nanogram (one billionth of a gram) per kilogram of body mass to kill a victim makes eating sodium cyanide feel like play-dough. A single crystal of the Botox, the size of a grain of sand, could kill 9600 healthy humans.
The toxin is formed by a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum. The bacterium is quite common actually. Its spores are found in the air, soil, and even in stagnant water. In this stage, though, the bacterium is quite harmless. It can only germinate in a low oxygen environment. Once it germinates, it produces a concoction of seven different toxins; four of which, are deadly to humans. In the human body. These toxins could cause severe neuromuscular damage, even at trace concentrations. This causes all the muscles in the body to go limp. It degenerates one of the important quality of muscles: excitability, rendering the muscle cells unable to receive and respond to the impulses from the nerves. This includes the diaphragm and the cardiac muscles, causing the victim to asphyxiate or go into a cardiac failure.
The bad news is, honey is a very comfortable environment for harboring the spores of the bacterium. Considerable amounts of spores are found in it, and could not be removed by any viable means. Once ingested, the spores course through the bloodstream to find a low oxygen environment. Once settled, they germinate into the bacterium, which is almost a point of no return. But hopefully, healthy adults and children have mechanisms to remove the spores before they germinate, but infants don’t. This is why children under twelve months of age should never be given honey.
But the real villain here is not honey. It is improperly canned food. During the canning process, the food item is deoxygenated to preserve it. This creates an ideal condition for Clostridium botulinum to germinate. In a proper canning process, heating would kill the bacteria before they release the toxin. But as the FDA, and many cases of death due to Botox food poisoning have shown, not all manufacturers heat the consumables to a temperature high enough to kill the bacteria. In this case, we could not depend on our immune system too, as it is not just the spores, but mature bacteria that enter our system. And our body could do nothing against it.
This is but, a risk though. It is not necessary that every pack of canned Vienna sausage should come with a healthy dose of the world’s deadliest poison. But it is always good to properly heat the contents before consumption, no matter how “instant” they are.
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