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Ed Yeates ReportingOne of the most repulsive parasites around is actually coming to the aid of humans, helping to heal wounds like you won't believe.
Salt Lake's Wound Care Center used them for the first time today on a 72-year-old Utah rancher.
Maggots normally creep us out, but in this case, instead of dealing with death, they're actually helping save a life.
**A caution here. This story might be uncomfortable for some readers.**
Medical maggots, as they're called, are laboratory bred in a lab at the University of California at Irvine. They're between one sixteenth and an eighth of an inch when they go into the wound, and almost a half inch in size when they come out. These kind deal only with the wound and will not invade the rest of the body, but in every other respect, they do what maggots do best.
Michael Garey, M.D., Wound Care Center: "Can clean out all of the dead tissue without causing bleeding, without causing additional scarring from surgery, and can be done as an outpatient and very inexpensively."
The 72-year-old Utah rancher, who preferred not to be identified, had a nasty deep seated groin wound from cancer and radiation treatment. Over 24 to 48 hours, the maggots will eat only the dead tissue, leaving living, healthy tissue alone. They'll also consume bacteria in the dead tissue.
In-patient surgery in a hospital to treat this wound could cost upwards of three thousand dollars. The maggots treatment costs only about one hundred twenty dollars. New? Not really.
Garey: "As the maggots get bigger, and they can get up to about a half inch in size, you can feel the maggots either as they crawl by living tissue. They have spines that patients sometimes can sense. What we see now is a tremendous interest in medical science of looking at therapies that have been successful for centuries, even millennia."
Once the maggots do their thing and clean up the wound, the patient in this case will have follow up treatment in a hyperbaric chamber. The chamber triggers what is called angiogenesis - a stimulation of blood vessel growth which heals the wound even more.
Incidentally, we'll be there when the maggots are removed on Monday and will show you, hopefully, how much better the wound looks.
