I remember having small kids we took this very seriously. I always wondered if this was just another overprotective order, or could really be an issue.
> Infantile botulism is extremely rare. There are an estimated 100 cases per year in the U.S., among approximately 4 million children in the age range under 1. That’s a risk of 1 in 40,000. This is somewhat less likely than the chance of visiting the ER for a blanket-related injury in a given year (yes, I looked that up, and I do think it’s a good comparison).
> ... In an estimated 20% of cases — that’s about 20 cases a year — honey is one of the exposures. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the botulism actually came from honey; it’s just that because we know the spores can live in honey … it seems possible.
> At best, this suggests that by avoiding honey, you could lower the risk of infantile botulism from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 50,000.
In an extreme example… only 20 parents fed their kids honey and 20 kids contracted botulism.
That would be a 100% risk. Obviously in real life it’s not 100% of kids, but still could be a meaningful percentage and likely higher than 1 in 50,000 for babies that eat honey.
If that is so, then completely removing honey exposure for infants would mean that 80 rather than 100 infants get botulism poisoning.
So the new probability of contracting botulism is (80 / 100) * (old probability), and (80 / 100) * (1 / 40000) = 1 / 50000.
Kid went full Winnie-the-Pooh on the jar.
"The second most common prelacteal feed is honey, a delicious natural sweetener. Numerous studies [29,30] have shown that the ingestion of honey under one year of age is linked with infant botulism, a disease that results in a blockade of voluntary motor and autonomic functions. Apart from this, other prelacteal feeds get contaminated due to unhygienic environment, especially in rural India and in urban slums, resulting in infantile diarrhea. Thus, a wide range of prelacteal feeds and the introduction of early supplements result in recurrent diarrhea with multiple illness finally ending lives because of inaccessibility and unaffordibility of treatment and delayed or inappropriate care seeking behavior."
Rohini Ghosh - Child mortality in India: a complex situation (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12519-012-0331-y)
The paper lists a bunch of other traditional practices that have deleterious effects on the infants' health, such as putting unsanitary herbal concoctions on the babies navel while it's still healing, etc.
This mind-blowing statistic stays in my head:
"Diarrhoea is a leading killer of children, accounting for approximately 9 per cent of all deaths among children under age 5 worldwide in 2021. This translates to over 1,200 young children dying each day" - https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-diseas...
Almost one per minute.
Huh, I think this might be my first time hearing it.
Though tbh do people really eat that much honey? I only have some in my kitchen to have with tea when I have a cold. Other then that I almost never use it.
For me the shift happened when I stopped thinking of it as a sweetener for liquids and started thinking about it as a condiment to deploy conservatively but frequently.
And no, I don’t have diabetes yet. I’m not insane about it, but I do have it frequently.
> Some people have pointed out that botulism cases haven’t fallen over time despite parents being told not to give kids honey.
A=Infantile botulism
B=Kid eats honey
P(A|!B) = P(A) * (1 - P(B|A))
Not sure it is correct!
The ACX signature says:
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)
So
P(A|!B) = [P(A)*P(!B|A)]/P(!B)
= (1/40000) * .8 / ???
??? Is very small though if people take the medical advice.
Their number assumes nobody follows the advice!