Creepy, yet calming. Maggots' excretions soothe inflamed wounds, speeding healing.
Credit: Cory Doctorow
Posted on 12/06/2012 9:07:50 PM PST by neverdem
Yes, maggots are creepy, crawly, and slimy. But that slime is a remarkable healing balm, used by battlefield surgeons for centuries to close wounds. Now, researchers say they've figured out how the fly larvae work their magic: They suppress our immune system.
Maggots are efficient consumers of dead tissue. They munch on rotting flesh, leaving healthy tissue practically unscathed. Physicians in Napoleon's army used the larvae to clean wounds. In World War I, American surgeon William Baer noticed that soldiers with maggot-infested gashes didn't have the expected infection or swelling seen in other patients. The rise of penicillin in the 1940s made clinical maggots less useful, but they bounced back in the 1990s when antibiotic-resistant bacteria created a new demand for alternative treatments. In 2004, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved maggot therapy as a prescription treatment.
Although anecdotal reports suggested that maggots curb inflammation, no one had scientifically tested the idea. So a team led by surgical resident Gwendolyn Cazander of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands siphoned samples of maggot secretions from disinfected maggots in the lab and added them to donated blood samples from four healthy adults. The researchers then measured the levels of so-called complement proteins, which are involved in the body's inflammatory response.
Every blood sample treated with maggot secretions showed lower levels of complement proteins than did control samples—99.9% less in the best case, the team reports in the current issue of Wound Repair and Regeneration. Looking closer, the researchers found the broken-down remnants of two complement proteins—C3 and C4—in the secretion-treated samples, suggesting that the secretions had ripped the proteins apart. When the team tested blood samples from postoperative patients, whose wounded bodies were already scrambling to heal, they found that maggot secretions reduced the levels of complement proteins by 19% to 55%.
For good measure, the team tested the maggot secretions again after a day, a week, and a month to determine their shelf life. They also boiled some. To their surprise, the secretions were more effective after boiling and lost no potency after sitting on the shelf for a month.
It's not surprising that maggot secretions would suppress the immune system, Cazander says. Otherwise, the larvae would probably be attacked by the body. She says she hasn't yet seen such a reaction, even in patients treated with maggots for more than a year.
Cazander's team is now working to isolate the complement-inhibiting compounds. A clinical drug featuring maggot secretions may be several years away—but if you can't wait, the maggots themselves are available now.
The research team's conclusions are spot-on, says Ronald Sherman, pathologist, pioneering maggot researcher, and board chair of the BioTherapeutics, Education and Research Foundation in Irvine, California. Sherman's nonprofit foundation connects patients with doctors willing to handle the crawly critters. Faster wound healing probably arises from several combined maggot effects, he says, such as increasing oxygen concentrations in the wound and enhancing cellular growth. "This research advances our understanding of how and why maggot therapy helps wounds heal faster."
Ping... (Thanks, neverdem!)
This was documented during the Civil War, when military surgeons noted with amazement that severely wounded Confederate soldiers tended to heal faster and overcome gangrene better than their Union counterparts because they were invariably “cleaned” by the maggots (as a result of their generally poor and unsanitary post-battle hospital care.)
Note that many herbs DO work as medicines if you know which and how much;there are natural cures for many ills ,but it seems they are not so neat as we have come to expect.
We had a young cow severely gashed by brab wire many years ago.Maggots infested thwe wound and we flushed them out with the garden hose.Her wound healed cleanly and she was a productive member of the dairy herd for some years.
Maggots,leeches, and herbs were the tools of healers for centuries.Of course just as now not everyone survived all the treatments by all the healers.How many die of doctor’s,nurse’s and laboratory mistakes today every year ?I seem to remember it is about 100,000 !Hundreds sickened and dozens dead recently from bad steroid injections for back and other pains.
Where they must have an unusually low rate of stomach ulcers...
Oh MAGGOTS! I thought they said faggots
LOL!
I just realized...my face is all scrunched up.
Nasty wound, that. Electrical discharge or mine?
>>Nasty wound, that. Electrical discharge or mine?
Hard to say what caused it, isn’t it? Looks to me like it was festering for some time and I would think the blood flow to the wound, and therefore the effectiveness of antibiotics, would be substantially reduced. That would make it a more likely candidate for maggot therapy.
Ping for why you don’t need a doctor...
The little fat white worms under rotting logs are known as grubs - not maggots. I think they are beetle larvae. Bears and Bear Gryls like to eat them.
There were some very important medical discoveries during the US Civil War.
One was that quartering wounded in horse stables could often achieve a 100% mortality rate. So “don’t do that”.
The other was the growing consensus for decades that antiseptics, alcohol and carbolic acid, were of great help in preventing infection, though this was only formalized just after the Civil War by Joseph Lister in Britain.
However, much evidence in the Civil War seemed to indicate just the opposite. This was because even though Union Army wounded generally had much better sanitation, clean bandages, and medicinal alcohol, their mortality rate was *higher* than for wounded rebel soldiers whose wounds were often infested with maggots.
This was because many of the battlefield wounds had been contaminated with soil rich in the anaerobic bacteria that caused the various kinds of gangrene. When buried deeply in the flesh, such bacteria were protected from antiseptics, but not maggots, that would burrow down, but only eat dead flesh, not living flesh.
For those grossed out by maggots, let me assure you that the smell of gangrene is so unique, powerful, and awful, that it is far worse than mere maggots. On the rare occasion when someone in the US gets gangrene today, it is said that “If they are put in a room on the third floor, the smell two floors away will be almost intolerable.”
It is such a rarity that physicians will come from far away just to smell that smell, so they can recognize it immediately if they ever smell it again. No one ever forgets what it smells like.
Hi GG! I have a friend who is a nurse at a trauma center. You are right.. the little suckers to their job and do it well. The maggots are “sterile” meaning they are “raised” specifically for medical use. The staff doesn’t keep a rotting piece of meat somewhere to collect the. The nurse counts the number applied and removes that same number. I will say this: the doctor would have to write me a prescription to put me in la-la land but I’d consent to this therapy if it allowed me to keep a limb.
You mean I can’t just use the “Around Me” app on my iPhone, enter “maggots”, and have it find the nearest maggots?
MY reaction isn't quite as strong as yours, nevertheless, I hear you on the sedation part.
Do what they need to do and wake me up when it's over.
The first photo was enough for me.
I'm no wuss, but those photos are NOT for the faint of heart.
>>I will say this: the doctor would have to write me a prescription to put me in la-la land
You’d probably already have that for most of the wounds they would treat like this, the exception being one deep in the flesh, but perhaps not all that serious - one that was difficult to reach.
As yefragetuwrabrumuy articulated, the ability to get into hard to access areas is a big plus of this therapy. The first case I ever saw (TV - never saw one in the flesh, so to speak) was an old woman who had an infection deep in some scar tissue from a previous injury - very deep - looked like she got hit with a meat cleaver or something decades before. The doctors would have had to cut away quite a bit of tissue to get at it.
>>The first photo was enough for me.
Well, the first photo was the ‘before’. There was a lot of improvement and the foot was saved, but, yes, I’m glad I changed my mind and did not simply post them.
Some of those bugs don't mess around and the damage done in a couple of days can be phenomenal. Why anyone would ignore even the smallest wound is beyond me. Stuff I used to blow off as "just a scratch" gets tended to promptly, especially with the kids. (Hydrogen Peroxide is your friend!)
Still, if things go all to heck, knowing maggots can be your friend could be handy.
I suppose that there is no guarantee they'll work but what's the alternative?
OOPS! LOL!
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