Maggots back in action on Casualty!

This Saturday our favourite medicinal maggot wonders were back in action on Casualty. One of the plots focused around the treatment of pressure sore on the back of a patient.  Maggot therapy (MT) is an excellent treatment for pressure wounds, and indeed wounds such as diabetic foot ulcers and burns.  At first though, the patient doesn’t want to go through with the therapy as he finds the idea of maggots within his wound off-putting (to put it mildly!).  This is not an uncommon reaction for people when first faced with the idea of maggot therapy – we call it the Yuck factor and for the past few years have been researching how people feel about maggot therapy.

In general, when first asked about MT people generally do not want to have it at all, and are worried about what will happen when the maggots are put on the wound and if it will hurt.  However once the procedure is explained and how maggots can help clean certain wounds much faster than other treatments, people tend to be more accepting of the treatment and willing to try it.  You can see that happening in this episode when Jade explains to Campbell how maggots are like hoovers that suck up the bacteria and dead skin in his wound.  Medicinal maggots don’t have teeth, they secrete a digestive juice that breaks down the necrotic part of the wound and then they ‘suck’ the infected dead flesh back in and metabolise it.

Maggots have also been shown to produce antimicrobial factors in their secretions, so can work to kill bacteria that surrounds them in a wound too.  In this episode Jade and Dylan are using free range maggots on their patient, but ‘bagged’ maggots are also used on NHS prescription. In the episode you can see the hospital’s maggot rearing lab – some hospitals around the world do raise their own maggots, but hospitals can also order maggots from companies who specialise in the rearing and distribution of clinical grade medicinal maggots.

Excitingly, Yamni was able to chat with Will and Gabriella (who play Dylan and Jade) about working with maggots on set  – sit back and press play to reveal all!

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All the ‘ssssssses’ for Super Science Sunday in Swansea!

Yamni and the Love a Maggot team were invited to Oriel Science’s Super Science Sunday in the Waterfront Museum on March 10th.  Our awesome mascot, Matty the Maggot (aka Paul Matthews, the creator of Matty) made his first appearance in person ever! James, Mike, Liam and Leanne were all on hand show off Matty’s friends and Yamni was booked to give a sell-out talk on “Maggots – medical marvels!”  Some photos below of the day!

Maggots vs Bacteria – all about the game!

Before you go and play our game (it’s right there under the Maggots  vs Bacteria  tab!) it might be interesting to see how this game came to be and how long a project like this takes to develop.  In early 2015 Yamni was talking to her colleague Prof Amy Brown about different ways to get the message out about how great medicinal maggots were at zapping bacteria in wounds.  They hit on the idea of some sort of game but at the time didn’t know how to go about starting the process.  A year later, Yamni mentioned the idea of a game to the people at Cherish DE and they suggested that she go have a chat to Dr Sean Walton, a computer scientist based in the Bay campus at Swansea and who also is a game developer.  Yamni and Sean specced out the idea of the game but soon realised they also could do with the advice of a graphic designer and UX specialist.  Luckily Chris Sherwood, a senior UX designer working at Swansea university was interested.  Together they applied for funding from the Impact Acceleration Account at Swansea University and won seed funding to develop the game.  Through 2017 and 2018 the game developed with funding from Cherish DE and when Stephen Mitchell, a software developer and tutor in Swansea joined in 2018 the team was complete and the game came on in leaps and bounds.  The final game was completed in 2019 and was user tested by 200 9-11 year olds in January 2019 before being beta released. The team will be releasing new versions of the game throughout the year taking into account feedback from player.

So please do take the survey when you play the game  – your suggestions might make it into the next release!

Early version of the game!