I have been told that maggots will only eat dead tissue, and thus can be used to clean infected wounds. However, it seems to me that such a basically unhygienic practice as letting flies lay eggs in a wound is, well, dumb. Are maggots so choosy? If so, is using them to clean a wound just a UL?
i see your point how it might seem disgusting to put maggots in a wound but i guess if worse comes to worse i guess maggots are better than nothing
Maggots are still occasionally used to treat wounds, usually as a last resort, so it’s definitely not an UL.
Maggot therapy has been used at least as far back as the Napoleonic wars, the theory being that lacking jaws the maggots have to wait until meat has putrified and is semi-liquid before they can ingest it. By consuming the putrid flesh they remove the source for the spread of infection. Tissue with a functioning blood supply doesn’t decay and hence is not touched.
In the bad old days flys either layed eggs in a wound accidentally and the grubs weren’t removes by the surgon, or captive bred maggots were tranferred directly into the wound. Not real hygeinic but an unhealing wound, particularly pre-antibiotics, was already probably infected with something fatal so there was no loss.
These days the grubs are fasted briefly to empty the gut as much as possible and then washed in antisceptic. This leaves them reasonably sterile.
From the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA):
Nature’s little surgeons indeed!
Maybe it goes back far beyond the Napoleonic period. I seem to remember The Gladiatior’s wound being treated with maggots by a colleague-slave after he was captured by the slave-traders. I know it was only a film but…
Maggots will go after necrotic flesh first. But you have to watch out because they’ll go after the living flesh once they run out of dead flesh. But yes they were used to clean wounds at one time and I believe in some cases are still used today for various reasons. Heck, they still use leeches for medical reasons.
Marc
Yes, there are lots of websites that show maggots debriding wounds. I’ll add a link to a particularly gross picture of this when I find it again. - Jill
Here in sunny FL we see animals with maggots all the time. The tech who runs the slowest gets stuck doing maggot picking duty. I adopted a cat who had maggots in her rectum and vagina, after her owner decided she wasn’t worth the cost of her vet bill. And just last night we had someone bring in their dog because it had been in a bad fight over a week ago. She didn’t care about the wounds or the terrible smell, or the possibility that her dog would go septic, she just didn’t like to see the maggots. We should have made HER clean them out.
Amyway, that has nothing to do with the OP, just thought I’d babble.
Cyndar, I hear ya. Last week I spent an inordinate amount of time flushing maggots from the delicate areas of fawns. Lovely task…
But, this ain’t really a hijack. Can anyone illustrate why, and when, flies lay eggs on living creatures? At what point does a wound become fair territory for maggots???
Might some of those maggots have been screwworms, those lovely pests who consume living flesh, causing quite a problem in some of our southern States?
Medical maggotry involves, I believe, larvae of the greenbottle fly. They will only ingest necrotic tissue, along with microbes, but not living tissue making them pretty useful in wounds where antibiotic resistance has become a problem. There is a certain ick factor involved for the patient though I would guess.
I’ve never actually seen this process but here at the hospital we did have a bucket o’ leeches a few years ago for a surgical patient.
Is this “theory” correct? Or just speculation dating to the Napoleonic era? In other words, how do the maggots know what to eat?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by toadspittle *
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How do you know what to eat? How does any creature know what to eat?
It’s not a case of knowing what to eat. For those species lacking jaws strong enough to tear off solid material they simply have to wait until microbial action has liquefied their food. It’s like asking how babies know not to eat shoe leather: they don’t necessarily, and they certainly try on occasion, but they just can’t do it.