Bacon Bandages Remove Botflies

Bacon Bandages Remove Botflies

Posted: June 18, 2015

What has barbed hooks, lives in flesh, and can be removed with bacon? The human botfly, of course.  

I’m Anna Rothschild, and this is Gross Science.

Human botflies, also called Dermatobia hominis, are insects that live in Central and South America. The adult flies live only for a few weeks—just long enough to mate and find some food for their offspring.

And where do they find their babies’ food of choice? In animal flesh. And human flesh does just fine.

To get her babies to a food source, the female bot fly latches onto a blood-sucking insect like a mosquito. Then she attaches her fertilized eggs to the mosquito’s abdomen and lets the mosquito take it from there.

When the mosquito lands on warm skin to feed, the botfly eggs hatch and the larvae dig their way in—feasting on secretions from the host’s flesh, and breathing through little air holes in their butts. If left undisturbed, they crawl out after six to twelve weeks to finish maturing on the ground.

But many people can’t wait that long. When you’re infested with a botfly larvae you have something called furuncular myiasis, and at least at the beginning it looks like a bug bite or a pimple. But as time goes on the bump gets bigger, and fluid drains from a small hole in the middle of it that the larva uses for airflow. Sometimes people can even see the larva’s tail poking out from the hole, and feel something painful moving around inside their skin, but they can’t pull it out because the maggot uses little hooks to anchor itself in place.

Fortunately, there are a few ways to extract a botfly. And believe it or not, one popular method is called bacon therapy. It’s based on a traditional Central American remedy that uses raw meat or pork fat to coax parasitic worms out of their subcutaneous homes.

A doctor lays strips of bacon over the larva’s air hole. And after a few hours, looking for air and perhaps intrigued by the delicious cured meats, the worm crawls out just enough to be yanked from the skin.

Bacon therapy is still performed today, but often the bacon is replaced by petroleum jelly, which is preferable to some patients, but arguably far less fun and delicious. Anyway, think about that the next time you bite into a nice fatty piece of bacon.

Ew.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Host, Illustrator, Animator, Editor

Anna Rothschild

Writer, Illustrator

Rachel Becker

DP, Sound, Intern Extraordinaire

Elizabeth Gillis

Many thanks to Norm Woodley and Darvin Scott Smith.

Celestine A

Music Provided by APM

IMAGES

Botfly Larva

©Paul Bertner

Botfly in Skin

The New England Journal of Medicine ©2005

SFX

Cockroaches

Freesound/StateAardvark
(used with permission from author)

Squeak Pack/squeak_10

Freesound/Corsica_S

Wink

Freesound/Bennychico11

Flying Mosquito

Freesound/zywx

Spinning Cable

Freesound/jaredgibb

Screen Door Opening and Closing

Freesound/snardin42

Produced by WGBH for PBS Digital Studios

IMAGE

(main image: Botfly and Bacon)

©WGBH Educational Foundation 2015

Want more info?

Botfly biology resources:
http://bit.ly/1Lb7Boz
http://1.usa.gov/1Lb7CJ1

Smithsonian round-up article on bacon therapy:
http://bit.ly/1Lb7cCD

JAMA article on bacon therapy:
http://bit.ly/1Lb7wkA