Olive could be anyone’s granny, but when was the last time your granny had 600 squirming maggots dropped into a hole in her leg? ‘I’ll try anything, I’ve had this wound on my leg for ten years, all I’m worried about is whether they will be tickly,’ she says laughing, ‘I’m very ticklish’. Three days later Olive’s leg was beginning to heal properly, she was delighted, and the maggots were a lot fatter.

 

Flipside followed the maggot trail back to Wales, to Europe’s largest maggot farm where Louise Murray met Dr Steve Thomas of Zoobiotic Ltd to learn more about maggot therapy and how it works.  Steve shows me around his nursery like a proud father. Opening a box, he pulls out some liver, which is actually the smelliest thing here, ‘Those white cylinders are the eggs, they’ll hatch by tomorrow morning and grow up to be the world’s smallest and youngest surgeons, working by the time they are two days old.’ Steve’s maggots are not destined to become lunch for a fish, but to save lives.  ‘The hungry maggots of the greenbottle fly will only eat dead flesh and bacteria, so do a great job of cleaning up wounds like Olive’s,’ says Steve.

 

Maggots have a long history of helping medical science. Two hundred years ago military doctors noticed how maggots did a great job of eating dead flesh on living people.  Wounds infested with maggots actually did better than wounds without maggots, healing quicker.  But the wriggling doctor’s assistants fell out of favour when antibiotic use spread.

 

Maggots are now beating antibiotics at their own game and can kill the deadly superbug, Methicillin–resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, which is resistant to most of today’s antibiotics.  It is not known exactly how they do this but it’s a combination of things.  When the maggots start to feed they produce proteolytic (protein digesting) enzymes which breakdown the dead tissue in the wound, reducing it to a kind of soup, which the maggots suck up. Live bacteria go in one end and dead bacteria come out the other.  Also, the animals are photophobic (they don’t like light), so they naturally burrow down deep into the nooks and crannies of a wound, just where a surgeon would want them to go.  ‘They need no training, they are pre-programmed by nature to behave like this,’ says Steve.  I asked him if he had met resistance from patients who find the idea of having maggots on their body too gross, Steve said there were few problems, ’If its a choice between putting up with maggots, or having your leg amputated, there’s usually no contest.’

 

When the animals are actively feeding in a wound, they change the environment by changing the acidity, making it hostile to many microbes.  They also seem to stimulate the healing process by encouraging the formulation of granulation tissue.  This is the stuff that fills in the hole when you have cut yourself.