Remember what NASA called the Challenger explosion? A “major malfunction”! :rolleyes: Now there’s a report that senior staff at a VA hospital is blaming their mice infestation on a “cleaning oversight”. Live mice eventually become dead mice and the corpses have been attracting flies. Some of these flies laid eggs in the nostrils of at least two patients! Of course, this went unnoticed until the eggs hatched. One senior doctor brushed off the resulting maggots as “gross but harmless”. What the fuck is the matter with these people?
Yeah, I know, you want a link to the hospital story. I wasn’t able to find any, maybe someone else can.
Actually, while IANAD, that doctor’s comments about the maggets seems spot-on. It’s nasty as hell, but I don’t see how maggots form much health risk. In fact, maggots are growing in popularity as a treatment object. They are placed in a wound, and they eat up all the dead tissue, and stimulate living tissue to heal at the same time.
And you can pick up leeches at a bait shop to clear up an imbalance in your humours.
(Sorry, sorry, I know that maggots (and leeches) are viable solutions under certain circumstances, but I just can’t help but wonder when we’re going to try shaking a magic rock over a broken leg to try to set the bone…)
Re: the use of leeches in medicine;here is a link to an article desribing their use in treating varicose veins and in helping rejoin skin after breast surgery or re-attaching limbs. I have no link for this, but I seem to have heard about using leeches to treat severe bruising and black eyes as well.
[/leech hijack]
When I was a lab tech student, we read about a hospital that had it’s water supply contaminated with Pseudomonas Aeruginosa; this water was used to bath the eyes of people who had eye surgery. P. Aeruginosa is an anaerobe, and thrived in the moist, airless conditions under the eye bandages, and when the bandages were removed, the bacteria had eaten the eyes out of the sockets. Now, THAT’S a bad thing.
Well, not to be a prig or anything, brondicon, but the very title of this thread has a “gross” warning on it. You opens it, you takes your chances.
(And I’m eating my lunch, too, as it happens.)
