Genghis Khan ruled from 1206 to 1227
What is the value of Genghis Khan, the Civil War in the United States and the Public Health Organization in the United Kingdom? The answer is: insects. Yes, you read right, insects. You see that flies, like most insects, go through larvae and other stages, from eggs to adults. Bees are in many types of larvae in the form of magnets during the process. There is talk of certain insects such as cauliford, blue fly or green fly. Most of us have seen them fluttering on rotten meat or on pet waste. In the meantime, their number may increase tenfold.
But some of these species are not harmful but have medical benefits.
Battle wounds
The idea of maggots crawling over your wounds may not sound good, but their medical use, known as debridement therapy, has been around for a long time.Legend has it that Genghis Khan, the founder of the largest contiguous empire in history, used to travel across Asia with a bag full of insects to help his soldiers.
These worms will crawl into their wounds and eat their flesh. These insects must have been left in dead and decaying tissue, not alive.Intriguingly, it is believed that Genghis Khan and his armies knew that there were maggots that not only ate their rotten flesh but also cleaned the wounds after chewing on the infected tissue.But this strategy was not adopted only by the Mongols.There is evidence of it among the ancient Ngyampa tribe of New South Wales in Australia, the hill people of northern Myanmar and the Maya of Central America also used it.
The tradition of cleaning wounds in this way is found worldwide
Interestingly, this method was not commonly used but was known to medical professionals worldwide.A surgeon named John Forney Zacharias, who worked briefly at a hospital in Danville during the American Civil War, began to notice this phenomenon.He was the first person in modern times to use maggots to deliberately remove decaying tissue. The results were quite good which he termed as 'satisfactory'.They found that insects also cleaned their wounds of bacteria.However, this work soon came to a halt when scientists such as Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur advocated hygiene, which was not compatible with the use of maggots.With the advent of Alexander Fleming and penicillin the practice was seemingly consigned to history, meaning no one wanted maggots crawling over their wounds anymore.But then in the 1980s, antibiotics proved ineffective against bacteria that had developed immunity to them. They are called MRSA.A new weapon was needed against them, and thus once again there was a return of the wounded insects which proved effective against them.Thus, the public health organization NHS in Great Britain also adopted this strategy. Now these maggots are packed like tea bags and cleaning of wounds is ensured.
