According to the AAAS, maggot therapy is a fantastic way to cure and heal chronic wounds and infections.
Per the Atlantic, 2021:
This flesh-eating repertoire is hard enough to stomach in the abstract. Now imagine hosting it on your skin. “Not everyone, psychologically, can deal with that sensation and knowing maggots are chewing on their flesh,” Robert Kirsner, the director of the University of Miami Hospital Wound Center, in Florida, told me. This is the barrier that advocates of maggot therapy face: the emotional gravity of pure human revulsion.
How to convince a maggot-hesitant patient? “I would say, ‘Please give me just 24 hours of your life,’” says Kosta Mumcuoglu, a parasitologist and medical entomologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Tomorrow at this same time, I will come back, and you can decide how to continue.” In that period, a smattering of maggots, about 32 to 50 per square inch of wound, can start cleaning out dead and dying slough and encourage remaining viable tissue to heal.
www.theatlantic.com/…
With the regrettable overuse of antibiotics, diseases are ever more tough to cure or treat. Hospital-born infections are among the worst, causing endless headaches for their Infections Disease departments. With what doctors now call Superbugs, many common antibiotics simply have no impact, as those pesky bugs have evolved and developed defenses and immunities to these drugs. This leads to the use of ever more exotic, expensive and risky drugs, which often have significant side effects.
From the American Academy of Science:
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.
Amazing how something small and seemingly disgusting can work with your immune system, ease pain, clean out infections and promote healing.
The more we learn, the more we forget. Just imagine what ancient scientific and medical knowledge was gathered, then destroyed in places like the Library of Ashurbanipal (modern day Iraq) or the famed Library of Alexandria (Alexandria) or the short lived Emperor Trajan’s Forum, a collection of more than 200,000 scrolls. I bet they knew about Maggots back then, too.
From a historical and library science perspective, we do have high hopes for the future. The Villa of Papyri, which was covered in tons of black ash in 79AD after Vesuvius got mad and blew its top, was the home for thousands of scrolls for centuries. Extremely careful treatment and fragment recovery is underway, using X-rays, MRIs and other modern tools. Careful exploration, archeological digs and research is bound to change our view of history, and quite probably add to our medical database.
All is not good, however, as with the good comes a lot of bad.
What is bad, and sad, is that huge reservoirs of potential natural cures and medicines were being destroyed by the likes of Bolsonaro, as he owned the libs whirled-wide, while he deliberately attacked and razed Brazil’s priceless rain forests.
Maggots — clean, hygienic, effective and incredibly helpful to humanity. Here’s to all Maggots!