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]
If maggots are so wonferful why was everybody so upset when Ann Coulter used the word?
wonferful = wonderful
As long as they don't get stoned too and sit around watching TV all day. Or consume the healthy new flesh with the bad on a munchie bender. :-D
As you say. I didn't mean to presume to even sound like I was trying to boss you around.
Still, it would be interesting, and perhaps life saving for the rest of us.
Their used in the US too for some burn wounds.
Wow! I really hope you choose to publish. You will have a lot of Freeper customers if you do. If you do publish; please include your Grandma's story. That would really make the book special. The "Spider-Web" cure is a new one to me! It's terrible to hear about the farm. I think the cures are an even better birth-right. God bless you in all of your endeavors!
I thought museums used a species of beetle to dispose of flesh off of animal bones.
Got some personal experience, and it works. Somebody dumped an old bulldog near my farm a few years ago, and he got pretty wild over a period of months. I decided to see if I could tame him, as I was couple of dogs low at the time. Meantime, somebody took a shot at him, grazed his back, and left a wound maybe 6 inches long, an inch deep, and it opened up 2 inches wide. I couldn't catch him to treat it, but I could get close enough to see that in a week or so it was totally full of maggots. He was still active, just acted as if it irritated him a bit. Eventually all the maggots disappeared, by which time he was willing to let me approach him. I sprinkled Terramycin powder on the clean wound for a couple of weeks until it healed, and he was just fine. Pretty good dog for a couple of years until he died of old age.
I guess some just feel it's easier to medicate the problem away than investigate and find out what's causing the problem and taking care of that.
My oldest daughter is allergic to carmine and Red Lake 7, which is in Benadryl. She breaks out with a severe hives reaction on her face and neck from it, along with breathing difficulty.
Sometimes it's the inactive ingredients that can cause problems.
The government hospitals in the UK are so ancient and filthy, they don't need to import any maggots.
I use baking powder and vinegar for cleaning! And add in hydrogen peroxide, too.....what's old is new again....and less costly, and less toxic! (Don't mix vinegar and hydr. perox. in a bottle together though!)
Was the guy dead?
If you ever put this book together, and want to share, can you ping me with the remedies?
Sounds fascinating.
I haven't tried it, but I've read they shouldn't be mixed together....and on this board "I" didn't want to be responsible for any "explosions" or whatever.
Oh no I didn't take it that way....its one of the few things I have from my babba ( grandma). I would be glad to share anything in her book. She would want other people to benefit from anything she knew. She also was a midwife for the neighbors. She was a very tiny woman who lived a very hard simple life. When she died she was still very beautiful , with no wrinkles and long white hair almost to her knees. My one son has her blue eyes. I have that now too, I really never thought of it that way. I do see her eyes when I look at his...~P~
Info about the sterile maggots used for wound treatment:
http://www.dressings.org/Dressings/larve.html
http://www.zoobiotic.com/
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