Faced with growing resistance to antibiotics, the National Health Service (NHS), the British public health system, is using a rather unusual treatment: maggot therapy. The number of treatments administered “has increased by almost 50%” in ten years, according to The Telegraph.
In modern history, this technique became widespread during the First World War, “when a surgeon noticed that soldiers’ wounds healed faster when they were ‘colonized’ by maggots”, explains the British daily. The remedy was then gradually abandoned from the 1940s, with the appearance of antibiotics.
Raise thousands of green flies
“However, with the development of antibiotic resistance, it becomes more difficult to treat wounds, and doctors are therefore forced to return to this outdated approach”, declare it Telegraph. In 2004, the NHS therefore authorized the use of maggot therapy, and BioMonde, a British company, has since been raising “thousands of green flies every year, for sale to the NHS and across Europe”.
The technique consists of placing a “tea bag” stuffed with larvae on the patient’s wound for a maximum of four days. “So they suck all this porridge through the bag, and then we remove the bag filled with the wound’s humors”, explains Yamni Nigam, professor of health sciences at Swansea University, Wales.
But despite the small size of the maggots – less than 1 millimeter – this therapy still puts off many caregivers. “Of course, I think everyone has a natural aversion to crawling little critters, and when it comes to maggots, they tend to inspire instinctive disgust in most people,” concludes Yamni Nigam.