Tag: ancient

Maggots: Reviving an Ancient Medical Treatment

  • Maggots can be used as a medical treatment. Specifically, to help treat wounds. (Courtesy of the National Institutes of Health)

An ancient medical treatment is starting to be used again to treat wounds. But for many people, just the thought of the treatment is stomach-turning. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Melissa Ingells has the story:

Transcript

An ancient medical treatment is starting to be used again to treat wounds,
but for many people, just the thought of the treatment is stomach turning.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Melissa Ingells has the story:


Ray Peterson has already lost one leg to diabetes. On his remaining foot
there’s a deep wound, and it’s not healing. It’s not getting better because
of the diabetes. He could lose his second leg.


His doctor is taking the dressing off Peterson’s wound. The wound…is
ugly. It looks like someone drilled a quarter-sized hole deep into
Peterson’s foot. The wound smells bad, and then the doctor finds
maggots. The blowfly larvae are squirming around in there. The doctor
is not surprised, though. He put the maggots there a few days ago. It’s
part of the treatment to save Ray Peterson’s leg.


They’re not exactly the kind of maggots you’d find in your garbage can,
but they’re similar. Last summer the FDA approved maggots as medical
devices.


The maggots eat the dead tissue, not the live flesh. In a process
researchers don’t completely understand… the maggots actually clean
and disinfect the wound much better than a surgeon could. Apparently,
they’re attracted to the bacteria in the dead tissue.


Ray Peterson is in his doctor’s office, trading in some big, full maggots
for some new hungry ones.


The old, fat maggots are washed off with saline. The doctor has to dig around
with the tweezers to get a few strays out.


Ray Peterson says he doesn’t mind seeing the process.


“I enjoy watching them, truthfully.”


The doctor cleans the wound a bit more and then places tiny, new maggots on
it with a small spatula.


(Sound of office)


There are plenty of maggot jokes as Dr. Dowling and the nurses work on
Peterson’s foot. Dowling says that his staff has become comfortable with
the maggots, but many health care professionals are not.


“Actually the patients react much better than the doctors. Every patient
I’ve done it on has been very excited and enthusiastic. I can’t say that’s
always the case for the medical community at large. I’ve had some
doctors tell patients if you have maggots on your foot, don’t come in my
office, but I think that will go away with time the more it’s accepted.


The new maggots start moving around as soon as they feel warmth and smell
food. Dr. Dowling and his nurses quickly contain them with a bandage.


“We build a cage around the wound to hold the maggots in, we’ll put the
maggots in, cover up the cage, and leave it there for two to three days,
and during that time the maggots will increase in size two to three times.
And then, when they come in we’ll take the cage off and wash the maggots out
with saline solution, and look at the wound and decide if it needs another
application or not.”


Several clinical studies have been conducted on the maggot treatment.
The results have been overwhelmingly good, but because the idea is so
repulsive to many patients or their doctors, the practice is still not
widespread.


Robert Root Bernstein is a professor of physiology at Michigan State
University. He co-wrote the book “Honey, Mud, Maggots and other Medical Marvels.”


“Taking a maggot or a bunch of maggots and putting them in a wound and watching
them crawl around in there is not something that most people find appealing, and
usually okay for the patient – the patient doesn’t actually have to look. It’s the
practitioners who have to deal with these squirmy little things and have to put
them in and take them out who seem to have most of the problem with the therapy.”


Root Bernstein says maggot therapy might catch on. That’s because doctors are seeing
more and more diabetic wounds as the rate of diabetes keeps going up in the U.S.
When medicines such as antibiotics don’t work on the stubborn wounds,
patients and doctors sometimes turn to the maggot therapy as their last hope for
recovery.


Ray Peterson found out about maggot therapy when his daughter saw an
article in a local newspaper. He says at first his friends were a little put
off, but then started kidding him about the procedure.


“They call me maggot man. Just for a joke. I go along with them. You’re a pretty
good sport about this. You gotta be.”


And Peterson says the good-natured ribbing is sure a lot better than the
alternative. Peterson also thinks if people can get past the “ick” factor…
more people’s limbs might be saved by maggot therapy.


For the GLRC, I’m Melissa Ingells.

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Exploring a Great Lakes Salt Mine

  • Salt is an essential resource for all people, especially those who live in areas where the roads get icy. (Photo by Lucian Binder)

Ever wonder where road departments get the mountains of salt they use each winter? Here in the Midwest, the answer can be found deep under Lake Erie. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ann Murray has the
story:

Transcript

Ever wonder where road departments get the mountains of salt
they use each winter? Here in the Midwest, the
answer can be found deep under Lake Erie. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Ann Murray has the story:


Orvosh: “Step right in there.”


Murray: “Ok, thanks.”


For Don Orvosh, an elevator ride nearly 2000 feet underground is just part of the daily grind.


(sound of clanking)


“It’s about a four and a half minute ride to the bottom. 1800… about 1800 feet.”


Orvosh supervises the Cleveland salt mine owned by Cargill Corporation. It’s one of only eleven active salt mines in the country. The mine lies beneath the northern edge of Cleveland and extends about four miles under Lake Erie.


Orvosh: “Most people in the city don’t even realize there’s a mine right here.”


Murray: “Are you all the way down?”


Orvosh: “We’re at the bottom right now. This is it.”


(sound of opening air-lock door)


A few feet from the elevator, Orvosh walks through a series of air-locked metal doors. They rotate to reveal a subterranean repair shop. Massive dump trucks and cranes are fixed here. The cavernous room is also the starting point for hundreds of miles of tunnels. These tunnels connect a honeycomb of old and active areas in the mine. Everyday, 150 workers travel this salt encrusted labyrinth by truck or tram.


“We’re going to get in this little buggy here now and in a couple minutes we’ll be under the lake.”


Lake Erie is a geological newcomer compared to the salt buried below it. This bed – extending from upper New York to Michigan – was formed 410 million years ago. That’s when an ancient sea retreated and left behind its brine. Oil drillers accidentally discovered the deposit in the 1860’s. As Orvosh drives north through the dark passageways, he says salt wasn’t extracted here until many years later.


“This shaft was sunk in the late fifties and the actual mining of salt occurred, started in the early sixties so it’s been here 40 plus years.”


In the last four decades, the mining process has stayed pretty much the same. Orvosh compares it to the room and pillar method used in underground coal extraction. He points up ahead to a brightly lit chamber. Machine generated light bounces off the room’s briny, white walls. Its 20 foot high ceiling is bolstered by pillars of salt the size of double-wide trailers.


Orvosh: “This is an active production section. This is where we are mining salt.”


Murray: “What’s happening here?”


Orvosh: “He’s drilling the face here.”


A miner sits atop a machine with a large needle nosed drill. It bores six holes into the seam. Later in the day, workers will load explosives in the holes and blow out big chunks of salt. Farther into the mine, the loose salt from last night’s blasting is being scooped up by front-end loaders and dumped into a crusher. All of the big chunks are broken into small pieces. Then the salt is loaded on conveyor belts and sent to the mine’s three-story-high underground mill. Salt is crushed, sized, screened and sent to the surface by elevator.


All told, the crews at the Cleveland mine produce two million tons of salt a year. A sizable chunk of the 15 million tons of salt used on icy US roads each winter. Demand for road salt has skyrocketed since it was introduced as a de-icer in the early 1950s. But Robert Springer, a 27- year veteran at this operation, says each mine fights for a market share.


Springer: “It is a competitive market. There’s another salt mine just in the Cleveland area, out there in Morton, Morton Salt.”


Murray: “We needed you today. The roads were really icy. Do you look forward to icy days to keep production up?”


Springer: “I guess you could say we look forward to bad weather. We enjoy the bad weather because we know there’s going to be salt used.”


(sound of radio and weather report)


Back on the surface, Bob Springer has gotten his wish… Cleveland has just been hit with a winter storm. At least a dozen trucks swing through the mine’s loading dock to pick up tons of salt. Later in the day, salt will be dumped onto barges and transported across the Great Lakes to places like Chicago and Toronto. This is high season for road salt. The crews here know that come March, they’ll start rousing salt from its ancient bed for the winter of 2006.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Ann Murray.

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Room for Wilderness in the Suburbs?

  • Lilies like these reside in the Reinstein Nature Preserve. Environmentalists worry about natural life in the preserve as the state of New York considers opening it up without restrictions.

Imagine a suburban, backyard wilderness where 200 year-old trees still stand. That’s exactly what you’ll find at the 300 acre Reinstein Nature Preserve. It meanders right through the heart of a bustling suburb. The preserve has been limited to small groups led by a nature guide. But there’s a new plan to give unrestricted access. Some environmentalists worry that would ruin the preserve. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak takes us to the woods – and to the debate:

Transcript

Imagine a suburban, backyard wilderness where 200 year-old trees still stand.
That’s exactly what you’ll find at the 300 acre Reinstein Nature preserve.
It meanders right through the heart of a bustling suburb. The preserve has been limited
to small groups led by a nature guide. But there’s a new plan to give unrestricted access.
Some environmentalists worry that would ruin the preserve. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Joyce Kryszak takes us to the woods – and to the debate:


A Great Blue Heron perches lazily in the distance above an expanse of pink water lilies.
At first Bob Reinstein doesn’t see the bird.


“I should’ve brought my field glasses.”


But then its giant wings spread wide, laboring to clear the water in this serene Monet-like setting.


“The lilies were a gift from two different environmental organizations…”


The man and the majestic heron both seem oblivious to the rush of cars and people just
beyond the edge of the woods. This is the Reinstein Nature Preserve. It’s framed on all sides
by a sprawling suburb of houses and shopping plazas in Western New York. Like his parents before
him, Bob Reinstein says he’s risked his life for nearly sixty years defending this scene; he guards it against trespassers – and sometimes trespassers with guns.


“Their lives were threatened several times, in fact, mine was also. I was unarmed at the time,
but he had pointed his shotgun at me and threatened to shoot. Realizing it was pointing at my face,
I stopped following him.”


But Reinstein never stopped trying to protect the nature preserve his father created half a century ago.
By the time he died in 1984, the elder Reinstein had dug nine ponds, planted thousands of trees,
rare ferns and flowers to compliment the ancient scene. The younger Reinstein says it’s like a
living museum.


“Where else can schoolchildren walk back through history a hundred and fifty years and see
samples of what existed then, that are still here today?”


Reinstein says his father bequeathed the preserve to the state to keep it from being trampled.
He stipulated that it must stay forever wild. People could visit, but only for educational
purposes. And only with a trained nature guide. That could all be changing. A proposal by the
State Department of Environmental Conservation would give the public unrestricted access.


Jane Wiercioch lives in the nearby suburb and loves visiting her backyard wilderness. But today
Weirchioch is handing out petitions here. She hopes to stop the DEC from opening the preserve. She
says it would leave the woods vulnerable.


“I know I came in here the other day for a walk around that lily loop with my great granddaughters
and, of course, they were chasing frogs. So, I’m with them, I’m yelling at them, ‘don’t do anything.’ But can you imagine having people just coming in here and doing what they want?”


State conservation officials say bringing in more people is the whole point. Meaghan Boice-Green
is a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. She says all
other department-run properties are open to the public. Boice-Green says unrestricted access would be good for both the public and for the agency.


“We’re not talking about property that hasn’t touched by the hand of man, and in order for us
to obtain the funding to do the habitat maintenance that’s going to be necessary to maintain
this manmade habitat, we have to provide some public access. We’re not going to be able to
access funds to support a property that the public isn’t allowed to access.”


But the state has never had any trouble finding money to maintain the preserve before.
And Boice-Green couldn’t offer specifics about any extra funding.


Terry Boyle has volunteered as a guide at the preserve for eight years. But he agrees the
preserve should be unrestricted. Boyle says visitors can’t have a truly natural experience
if someone’s watching their every move.


“A lot of those people who do want to come in, they want to take photographs, they want to sit
down and reflect for a little bit about what they’re looking at, and that kind of stuff. So,
they can’t go at their own leisurely pace with tour guides, because we have to push them through a little bit
faster.”


But the head of a local environmental group sees it differently. Larry Watson says if the
preserve is opened, there won’t be anything left to look at anyway. He believes the state is
just tired of policing the woods. But Watson says it was Dr. Reinstein’s wish that the
preserve be kept wild. And he should know. As a young boy sixty years ago, Watson spent many
long hours in the woods, helping Reinstein plant the saplings that now tower overhead.


“If they turn this into what they want to, it will be nothing more than a state park.
And we’d rather see it kept as an individual showpiece and a place New York state can be quite
proud of and show the rest of the country what can be done in the way of environmental
conservation.”


The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation says it hasn’t made a final
decision. It will consider the wishes of those who want access to the preserve to remain
restricted. But many people are also demanding it be opened. Ultimately, the state says
it will likely let people come to the preserve whenever they want – and trust them
to be good caretakers.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Joyce Kryszak.

Related Links

Cats’ Role in Public Health

Humans first domesticated cats in about 2000 B-C. Since then,
our view of felines has ranged from loving to loathing …depending on
the
time and culture. Now, a new book traces the history of cats …and
makes
some connections about their impact on human health. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports:

High Grading Fails the Test

The recent announcement by the National Forest Service canceling a
cutting plan in New Hampshire’s White Mountains has Great Lakes Radio
Consortium commentator Don Ogden thinking about forestry issues we often
don’t hear about:

Ancient Canoe Discovery in Northern Great Lakes

A dug-out canoe found in Wisconsin is causing a stir with the historical society. Using advanced technology, researchers say the canoe is almost two-thousand years old. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mike Simonson reports: