"Put another leach on her forehead."
Posted on 03/11/2007 7:14:02 PM PDT by aculeus
Maggots clean wounds 18 times faster than normal treatments, can conquer MRSA and would save the NHS millions.
It’s enough to make your skin crawl — yet flesh-eating maggots being applied to a festering wound that fails to heal could become a familiar sight in our hospitals. Last week Madeleine Moon, Labour MP for Bridgend, hailed maggots as an alternative to expensive antibiotic gels and lotions. She pointed out that maggots could speed recovery times, help to free hospital beds and fight MRSA. In a parliamentary motion backed by 35 MPs from all parties, she urged the Government to carry out clinical research into the widespread use of maggots.
Recent studies have indicated that maggot therapy can cut treatment duration from 89 days to just five, and slash the cost from £2,200 to £300 per patient.
Moon describes the grubs as “a highly cost-effective, highly efficient but forgotten and undervalued method of treatment”, and Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, says that using fly larvae (maggots) is “increasingly common” and “an illuminating idea”
In trials in Wales and Manchester, says Moon, patients not only recovered faster but noticed less smell and felt less pain from their rotting flesh when maggots were allowed to eat it. “Maggots are highly precise,” she says. “Unlike surgeons, they remove only the rotting tissue. Surgeons have to cut out healthy tissue to clear the wound, thereby creating a larger wound and more bleeding.”
Last year 30,000 NHS patients had maggots applied to their wounds. A study published in the Journal of Wound Care suggested that if larvae were used more widely the annual saving could be £162 million.
Maggot, or larval, therapy is not new. Civilisations worldwide, from Australian Aborigines to Burmese hill tribes and the Mayans, have used fly larvae to clean damaged wounds for centuries. During the First World War, Dr William Baer, of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, described finding two soldiers who had been wounded on the battlefield and left alone for days. When their clothes were removed, thousands of maggots were present in their wounds — yet beneath them the doctor was astonished to find clean, pink flesh. Baer renewed interest in maggots among the medical profession but it was short-lived; by the 1930s, with the arrival of antibiotics and modern surgical appproaches, they fell from favour.
But with the spread of resistance to antibiotics and the rise of “superbugs” such as MRSA, antibiotics are no longer considered the panacea they once were. Instead, the tiny grubs are squirming their way back into mainstream medicine. It is now known that enzymes produced when maggots eat rotting meat break down the dead tissue, which is sucked up and turned into new protein. Crucially, the enzymes stop working on contact with healthy or clean tissue, so when they are applied — either loosely beneath a bandage or inside a sealed bag — to a leg ulcer, for instance, they will consume only the rotting materials and leave the wound clean. Because they are regulated by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA), maggots used for medical purposes are considered pharmaceuticals and therefore had to undergo years of rigorous safety and efficacy tests before being approved for use on patients. Now, though, they are being introduced in hospitals from Belgium to Poland with reports of great success.
Of course, there is a glaring downside to maggot therapy, and one that may prove an impenetrable barrier to its mainstream use — namely the “yuck” factor. Yet researchers who have been investigating the medical benefits insist that, for the good of our health, we should disregard it.
Dr Stephen Britland, a reader in cell biology at the University of Bradford, says that much of the stigma attached to maggot therapy, although understandable, is entirely undeserved. “From a scientific point of view it is fascinating how maggots have evolved to get the nutrients they need to grow from a wound,” he says. “People think they are dirty, but maggots are very careful about what they do and carry out a very clean procedure.”
Among the pioneers of maggot treatment in the UK is ZooBiotic Ltd, one of the first profitable spin-off companies formed from an NHS trust — in this case the Bro Morgannwg Trust’s biosurgical research unit at the Princess of Wales Hospital, Bridgend. ZooBiotic farms maggots from the sterilised eggs of the common greenbottle, Lucila sericata. Its brand of sterile maggots, marketed as LarvE, was accepted for use by the NHS in 2004 and the company now supplies them to 3,800 hospitals in the UK.
“We keep the adult flies in 150 insect-rearing tanks, then collect their eggs and sterilise them,” says Dr Alan Morgan, the firm’s research director. “They are applied to a wound when they are tiny — smaller than a grain of rice — and can grow to more than a centimetre in length by the time they are removed.”
Morgan says that preliminary trials were conducted at the Princess of Wales Hospital on five patients with MRSA-infected wounds that were not responding to conventional antibiotic treatment. “In each case, treatment with maggots cleansed the wounds, eliminated the MRSA and allowed healing to commence in four days,” he says. A larger and more significant study at Manchester Royal Infirmary last year showed that maggot therapy reduced problems in 12 out of 13 cases of ulcers colonised by MRSA. “The maggots cleared the wounds of MRSA,” Morgan explains. “They don’t cure MRSA but they will reduce the chance of cross-infection and allow it to be treated effectively.”
[balance of article at the link]
So that's what they do with all those laid-off MSM reporters.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that conference...;-)
No kidding... BARF!
LOL! It is true that maggots eat only dead flesh, and can actually clean a wound better than can be done otherwise. Just isn't something I would want to go through though!
The hell with the yuck factor. If it works, I'm all in favor. Just think of them as Mother's Little Helpers.
The joys of Government health care.
Ewww, I wouldn't want John Edwards sucking on my wounds.
Not to mention the MAJOR barrier..., there's no large profits to the drug industry for raising maggots!
ping
If you had to get rid of some dead flesh, I would bet that after one day you would get over the yuk factor. The desire to heal the problem would rule out over the alternative to undergo a lengthy treatment, even with painkillers and meds. Consider the yuk factor of having rotting flesh with you 24x7. It's amazing what the mind can overcome under duress.
I think I could tolerate such therapy as long as I didn't have to see it... I think anything that reduces the cost of medical care, while actually being better at fixing the problem is a good idea.
Our little friend, the maggot.
Some other interesting stuff in the article, too.
"Another creepy-crawly gaining popularity among doctors is the parasitic helminth worm. These, unlike other parasitic worms, do not cause disease or invade other body parts. A 2004 study in the journal Gut found that patients with Crohn’s disease who swallowed a worm for a 24-week period showed significant improvement."
MRSA is very hard to treat. I have a friend who can not get rid of it. My brother died of it and other complications. I think its a great idea. Years ago leeches were used too. If it works and it does a good job then I would try it. I would feel grossed out but when you think of the sponges etc doctors have left in people I think I trust the maggots more.
"Put another leach on her forehead."
"...and slash the cost from £2,200 to £300 per patient."
Even £300 seems high for a maggot treatment.
Mark
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