Instead of heavy Operation: Lucy-maggots can be serious wounds to heal
Many disgusted with her, have bad images in my head. When Lucy, however, has recorded the work only once, you quickly to the best friend of patients and Doctors. For Lucy, then, is used when only surgery will help.
Fly chronic wounds heal can larvae
Lucy is, actually, Lucilia sericata, and is a Fly, a gold fly more precisely. And to be precise, it is not the adult insect, which is passed in the hospital of the patient, but the larvae. “In a kind of teabag 50 to 300 are Packed fly laid maggots on a chronic wound,” says Chang, Wester, Susanne West. Then the Association comes about, and the larvae start their work.
What sounds unappetizing, from a medical point of view, The animal cells liquefy dead tissue, to slurp on the broth and stimulate the healing of the wound. The precipitates show a demonstrably positive effects, explains West. For years, the therapy not only in Merseburg application.
Larvae replace heavy surgical intervention
The Use of the fly, it was realized, as strange as it sounds, already at war-wounded, who were transported after a while from the battlefield to the hospitals.
The use of fly larvae to replace the so-called Debridement. Thus, the removal of infected, referred to as the damaged or dead tissue from wounds. The larvae do this, while the patients lie in bed. The Alternative would be a significantly more serious surgical intervention. Patients report a tingling, pain should not be the cause of the larvae.
The fly larvae are bred for the medicine
“You have, of course, can also bite, no teeth, with which they” emphasized a pharmaceutical consultant Miriam Filla. On behalf of the company Biomonde, she advises the Carl-von-Basedow-Klinikum for the use of the fly larvae, are bred under laboratory conditions, especially for therapeutic purposes.
At the company’s headquarters in Hamburg, the breeding is relatively simple: In the shelves, several boxes, in different sizes of fly colonies. Their size depends on how many larvae are required. “We are not able to produce the larvae, Yes on stock, because the pupate and develop to fly,” said Miriam Filla.
As the order’s hospitals, and will soon be bred. Then the egg-laying and harvest begins. “This little light can be set impervious doses with a Medium in the boxes,” says Filla. Its smell attracts the fly, the drop finally your eggs in the cans. After the harvest, a part is branched off for the breeding of new flies, the Rest of the eggs will be disinfected. In an incubator the larvae hatch then.
Nevertheless, not every Patient wants to be with the larvae treated
For the past ten to 15 years, estimates Chang Wester, Susanne West, come fly larvae in Basedow-Klinikum already. How many patients have been treated thus, could however, not say. “It always depends on the individual case, whether the therapy is appropriate,” she said. In addition, the idea was not to let fly larvae in a wound, crawl to despite the education for all patients an Option. Comparable to the reactions with the use of leeches in medicine.
The fly larvae can find for reasons of hygiene, only single use. “About four days the larvae in the wounds remain,” says Filla. In this time, Lucy has helped in the rule, then the 100 times of its original weight, and the patient hopefully.
This article was written by Michael Bertram