A 33-year-old patient with 85% burns was treated with a dressing made of bloodworms even though his life was in danger. It was the Nantes University Hospital which shared this news in a Press release, Friday December 15, 2023. The man was hospitalized during the summer of 2023 after suffering a boat accident on the Loire. He was cared for by teams from the burn center of the Nantes public hospital. His hopes of recovery were low since with his body burned to 85%, his prognosis was very unfavorable. Professor Pierre Perrot explained in the press release the doctors’ choice to use this dressing: “In this patient, in order to limit the surface to be grafted and therefore to be taken from the rare unburned areas, we opted for this dressing in order to try to heal the thorax, abdomen and back without surgeryallowing the preservation of graft donor sites for the hands and lower limbs.”
A dressing made from bloodworms
The use of this innovative dressing is a first in France. This has the particularity of being enriched with arenicola marina hemoglobin. These are bloodworms present on the beaches of the Atlantic and the English Channel. In addition to carrying 40 times more oxygen than human hemoglobin, it also makes it possible to reach very difficult to access areas and to be injected directly into the bloodstream. He therefore treated the seriously burned person by doing “restart the healing process continuously”. The patient was able to leave the hospital after three months to enter a specialized rehabilitation center. The results provided by this dressing have been recognized as “spectacular”. This dressing is therefore a great medical advance since in addition to having allowed a serious burn victim to be saved, it can also treat “diabetic foot ulcers, bedsores, or other wounds for which there is currently no satisfactory therapeutic solution.”