Fishing Lines: The Mother-in-Law? She’s Maggot Food

My mother-in-law has terrible feet. In fact, they are so horrible that maggots are crawling all over them. Now I know that this sounds like a Les Dawson joke. But it’s deadly serious. The maggots are actually making her feet better.

She’s a game old bird. She’s 94, with angina, diabetes, high blood pressure and a few sundry ailments, but she doesn’t complain much. She lives on her own, steadfastly refusing to move into sheltered accommodation. She’s tried a home and didn’t like it. Too many old people, she said.

But some weeks ago, she fell out of bed. She hadn’t been well anyway, so the local hospital wheeled her in, gave her lots of tests and kept her bed-bound. After a few weeks, she found it hard to walk. Her feet developed pressure sores that turned black, making it even harder to walk. It looked like she would be wheelchair-bound. But then the doctors suggested that maggots could be the answer.

I think this column was the first place, outside scientific journals, to reveal the healing power of maggots. I first wrote about it nearly 20 years ago. Now several hospitals routinely use them to heal infected wounds, especially where surgery is not an option. They are said to be one of the most effective means of treating wounds infected by the superbug MRSA, and are effective on ulcers and many other wounds where antibiotics don’t seem to work. The maggots, you see, don’t eat live flesh, only dead tissue. Even the best surgeon can’t clean a wound like a maggot.

You can even get them on the NHS now, though they are a lot more expensive than a surgical dressing, which typically costs about pounds 10 compared with 200 maggots at around pounds 100. This is because you can’t pop along to your local tackle shop and say: ‘My cut just doesn’t seem to be healing. Give me a pint of bronze, with a few reds mixed in to give the wound a bit of colour.’

Fishing maggots are bred on offal (typically fish scraps) on maggot farms, which are places you never want to visit. They make Dante’s most extreme works look like a nunnery. Doctor maggots are bred in sterile conditions. And it’s no good giving fishing maggots a nice chunk of steak to make them fatter because they have already stopped feeding. The medical variety are small and hungry, starting about the size of a salt granule and ending up about a quarter-inch long when they’ve gobbled up all that infected or dead skin. They work by secreting proteolytic enzymes that break down dead tissue into a soup (Campbell’s cream of maggot…) that they then ingest.

You may find the whole thing disgusting. But faced with the choice between losing a limb or having a few maggots crawling on you, it’s not surprising that most people take the latter. Best of all, you can fish with them afterwards. No wonder I’m monitoring my mother-in-law’s recovery with keen interest.