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Maggots: Coming to a Hospital Near You
Pokinatcha Punk writes "Forget breakthroughs in biotech. According to Yahoo! News maggot's may make their way back into popular medicine. According to the article 'maggots are remarkably efficient at cleaning up infected wounds by eating dead tissue and killing off bacteria that could block the healing process.'"
This 'story' hits the rounds every few months or so. It's distributed only for it's gross-out factor (ewwww, bugs!) and the cool (air-quotes) "maybe all that new-fangled science isn't the be-all-and-end-all" vibe.
I swear, I've read this same thing 20 times before.
which is why i've always wondered why they weren't used in medicine.
While in britain, I saw a show on bbc about maggots and diabetes patients.
Diabetes can, in some cases, cause flesh to die and maybe get infected.
The brits figured out to grow flies in a sterile environment, and use their offspring (maggots) to clean out the open wounds (sometimes it's not even open yet, just dead).
Wounds are packed with maggots and covered in gause, and the patient is set on their marry way, never actually feeling what's going on.
Maggots also sterilize the area when they feed, making the wounds safe from infection.
When there's nothing left to eat (all the dead flesh is gone), the maggots are dug out, the area is swabbed out, and the wound is sewn shut.
Latewire
You have to use the right species. Some species aren't too particular about not eating healthy tissue.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Bernard Cornwell, in his novels about the Napoleonic wars, has British soldiers using maggots to treat wounds. If that's at all historical, the practice probably dates back from prehistory, since it would have been taken up the first time somebody noticed the effects of maggots on tissue.
But that's a big "if". Modern medical maggots have been around for a few decades, but they're not something a nineteenth-century soldier would have had access to. They're carefully raised on a sterile broth, because maggots in the wild carry some really nasty germs. Putting wild maggots in a wound would be asking for a really bad infection. Which, in the pre-antibiotic era, was a death sentence.
The maggots I have seen, after feasting on the yummy, rotting flesh, will then burrow under the skin and begin to eat the healthy tissue, too. The key technique used in medicine is to remove the maggots once they have debrided the dead flesh away and before they begin to burrow.
Haß ist wie ein rostiger Nagel...
...Is what I've heard it called by some confederate sympahtisers. Very expressive name.
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
Leeches are useful because their saliva has a powerful anticoagulant, as well as a vasodialator, and they have an efficient (if unattractive) delivery system.
e main.htm
For more on the use of leeches in surgery, you can click here:
http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mcbstaff/graf/AvHm/MedUs
but I do not recommend clicking it while eating: rather high on the gross-o-meter.
OK, now what?
Be careful to use the right kind. Some maggots eat just dead flesh. The waste ammonia then sterilizes the wound.
Screwfly maggots are EVIL, they've been eliminated from the western US by a US govt program that releases sterile males into the wild. females only breed once, if they breed with a sterile male, it's wasted. Screwflies lay their eggs in open wounds, and the maggots bore into dead and living tissue. Humans and cattle have died from them, if they bore into important organs.