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.'"

Comments

Maggot biobots

[G4from128k]

Maggots (or some other little parasitic vermiform beastie) would seem to be an excellent starting point for medical biobots. They have all the machinery for motion inside a living body and a neat little tool for slurping up flesh. Perhaps a bit of genetic engineering would give the critters a taste for tumor tissues or fat cells (and an abhorrence for critical tissues such as nerve cells, muscle tissue, or blood vessels).

Re:Maggot biobots

[Bloater]

It is your association between maggots and refuse. People make decisions on where they spend their time and what they consume on the principle of "contamination". Maggots are contaminated by liking refuse, food with maggots in is thus contaminated. Cooking is not felt to be enough to decontaminate. Experiments with dipping cockroaches into orange juice showed that even a thoroughly disinfected (recently deceased) cockroach "contaminates" orange juice by being dipped in it.

I myself will happily rinse a used glass and re-use it, but if it has been put into a dishwasher which has dirty items in it (even if they are nowhere near the glass), I will normally get a fresh glass - I feel it is contaminated, though I know it isn't.

These associations to decide what is a contaminant and how much effort is required to decontaminate is mostly determined by how you perceived your parents reaction to them to be. IE a fishermans son will probably not care about a maggot in his dinner if he can just pull it out (decontamination is trivial as he saw his father happily warm maggots in his mouth).

I intend to try to react according to available scientific evidence in front of my children when I have them (regardless of how I feel about things myself), since it is important that they be able to make more realistic judgements about the world around them than I am capable of. While I *can* react more sensibly than I feel, I want my children to be able to react sensibly without effort so they can confidently be highly effective in their personal business and business business.

news?

[FidelCatsro]

I seem to remember whatching a BBC documentry on maggots cleaning wounds around 8 or 9 years ago .The story was fairly identical , although the BBC documentry whos name escapes me , went into far more depth , i belive it was tested in a hospital aswell.
I seem to remember the main advantage was the natural anestetic produced by the maggots as they feast on the effected tissue.Extremly gross and would really freak me out i imagine , but its supposed to be amazingly effective and have a far greater rate of recovery.

Patents

[sicking]

This sounds great for developing countries on a tight budget. (Well, medicine seems to be on a tight budget all over the world these days).

Anyone wants to take bets on how long it'll take for some company to create a genetically engineered worm that is slightly more efficient and patents it? And then somehow forces this new worm onto doctors all over the world, for a handsome fee of course.

Chicken

[Anonymous Coward]

My first real experience with maggots was some guy eating a chicken leg and where he had bit the leg it was all magoty.

I was only 8 and it creeped the fsck out of me.

(What was that movie... poltergeist maybe?)

Britain, Home of the Leg Ulcer

[blunte]

From the article:

Britain alone spends some 600 million pounds ($1.15 billion) a year treating leg ulcers, which affect 1 percent of the population and can persist for years.

What the heck!?

Re:repetitive, much?

[SgtChaireBourne]

It was only later, when the War had dragged on and on, and people (Northerners) were getting tired of it, that he made the war about the ending of slavery; and, even then, he freed slaves only in those states and territories that had rebelled against the Union

Actually that was to play the morality card and get more help from Europe.

Apropos skin color, slavery in most areas, including Europe was not about skin color, but social and economic status. In Denmark in the 1600 and 1700's there was a very fine line between conscript, prisoner, and slave. Going further back, in all the Nordic countries going from the 1500's to the 700's, there were codified rules about slaves, their status and when they could work their own land. The status could change, slaves could become free men and free men could sell themselves into slavery. Most slaves could buy their freedom within four or five years of work.

Anyway, regarding maggots, that and a lot of non-allopathic medicinal knowledge was put on the back burner shortly after the social changes brought on by WWII and improved travel. In continental Europe in the 1400's there was actually a purge of such knowledge and practitioners of such knowledge by the church as part of a consolidation of power. There was a book, Malleus Maleficarum, "The Witches Hammer" on how to find and destroy these socially influential individuals.