Maggots used to treat patients
September 09, 2004

A TRIAL using maggots to eat away dead and infected flesh on patients at the Royal Hobart Hospital has proved so successful
it will soon be used in overseas hospitals.

Maggot therapy has had wonderful results on seven RHH patients since it began in January this year.

RHH chief executive Ted Rayment said the specially bred maggots of the green fly were sent from Sydney's Westmead Hospital.

"The treatment has been excellent and very successful," Mr Rayment said.

"It is used when surgery or antibiotics have failed.
"I've seen the maggots and they are quite small, but they cause no discomfort to the patients."

Mr Rayment said the maggots were colonised, harvested and sterile.

Of the seven patients treated, some have had more than one treatment.

"They are put on to wounds that aren't healing and they remove all the dead flesh," he said.

"The maggots don't eat any good flesh."

Mr Rayment said maggot therapy had been used in the Crimean War.

"They were used on injured soldiers to clean wounds and they didn't lose any limbs," he said.

"Try as we do to come up with better drugs and treatments, sometimes resorting back to nature is the way to go."

A small 2cm wound requires one vial of about 200 tiny disinfected maggots, but three or four vials are needed for larger wounds.

Westmead Hospital senior entomologist Stephen Doggett said maggots bred by him and his colleagues, and used at the RHH and hospitals in Japan, may soon be shipped to Madagascar and other international hospitals.

He said they could save Australia's health system millions.

"In the United Kingdom now it's phenomenal, they're actually saving their health system in the order of $1 billion annually in wound reduction and surgical costs," Mr Doggett said. "It's much cheaper to provide maggots than to provide the cost of operating."