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]
I would be happy to. If you have a need just freepmail me and I will try to find something for you. ~P~
Thanks. I think this summer I will make it a project for my daughter & I to do. I just showed my son the Sugarloaf golf course and said how sad I was about it. He said well at least its not a strip mall or condos. So I guess he is right, at least the land is like it was for the most part. When they tore the old farm house down the main room was part of a what my mom said was a Indian cabin. I was too young at the time to remember if it was saved or not. I do know it was a great place to find arrowheads. I have not gone up there for many years ..maybe its time to go back and discover my childhood memories....~P~
Thank you.
If it wasn't for TigersEye's wisdom & help. I think I would still be giving her those meds and she would still be getting sick. he helped me so much that lela considers him her online Uncle or a very special friend. its amazing how many really great people I have met on here. People that will help you and you don't know them but from on here.
Unfortunately, only 3,000 were told about it ahead of time and fully a third of the others died of a heart attack when they viewed their wounds. The worst case was a dual experimentee whose leaches attacked the maggots and the patient bled out before anyone noticed. Nurses denied that the full leg amputee was only a week before receiving maggot treatment on a toe wound, discounting the patient's claims that "something ate my leg, I swear!"
but I made that all up. Maybe.
I have a recipe for skunk shampoo that's basically hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and Dawn. My sister used it on her white dog, having no desire for a pink one, and the vet who saw her dog a couple days later for an unrelated issue couldn't believe how effective it was.
It unclogs drains too! Years ago I was stuck in the house with a sink full of dishes and 4 little kids. No drain cleaner. They were amazed that mommy made a this stuff up and it bubbled and made the sink water go down.
Er...not all of them. Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers! You would have a big surprise if you were to visit either my local or regional NHS hospital, where everything - buildings, equipment and service - is spanking new and clean. The one thing I've learned after a lifetime of close contact with the NHS, in one capacity or another, is that any generalisation about the NHS is always wrong.
Dear lady, I direct you to part of the article:
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.
Maggots are also used in other European countries, including Belgium and Poland as mentioned in the article.
And I read that there's an increasing number of women dying in child birth under NHS.
I don't know about this, but as my wife gave birth 9 weeks ago in an NHS hospital, I can certainly speak from VERY recent experience. The Maternity Unit was wonderful, sparklingly clean and offering a range of services experiences including water birth and aromatherapy massage during the early stages of labour. We were looked after by the most marvellous young midwife, who was excellent, and my wife received absolutly outstanding care during a difficult 17-hour labour. My wife and our new son had to stay in hospital for 3 days and she was in a small ward with only 3 other mothers in a bed next to the window with a view out over a lake. Agian, she received excellent care along wiht advice on breast feeding and babycare.
100% thumbs up for the NHS from me on this experience, at least!
It is actually a very old treatment that was in use before antibotics came inot use, and is now be reintroduced.
There are actually places in the US that use this method also.
Actually, this one of the few times that British health cre has a good idea. Sanitary maggots do a beter job of debriding wounds than any other procedure. The Brits deserve credit for this one.
Quite right! Dermestid beetles are used for bone cleaning. I guess I thought of maggots because of their long association with cleaning decrepit wounds as far back as the US Civil War.
However, in reducing cadavers, you would probably have to use several insects to be both fast and thorough:
"Blowflies and other detritivores are attracted by the odour of decomposition, and as the smell changes during the decomposition process so does the species of invertebrate that is attracted. Therefore, species that are attracted to ‘fresh corpses’ are often different to those that are attracted to corpses in an advanced state of decay. Blowflies do not lay their eggs on corpses once these have passed a certain state of decomposition or they have become dry or mummified. By contrast, dermestid beetles do not colonize corpses until these have started to dry out."
Actually, leeches are a commonly-used therapy today.
http://www.webmd.com/news/20040628/leeches-cleared-for-medical-use-by-fda
http://arthritis.webmd.com/news/20031103/knee-pain-from-arthritis-try-leeches
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.