![]() ![]() “I’m willing to use anything that might actually help a patient,” Lee said. Given the substantial supply of donated human skin, tilapia skin is unlikely to arrive at American hospitals anytime soon.īut it may be a boon in developing countries. In the US, animal-based skin substitutes require levels of scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration and animal rights groups that can drive up costs, Lee said. Once cleaned and treated, they can last for up to two years. Lab technicians used various sterilizing agents, then sent the skins for radiation in São Paulo to kill viruses, before packaging and refrigerating the skins. The initial batches of tilapia skin were studied and prepared by a team of researchers at the Federal University of Ceará. READ MORE: High-tech bandage wins $100K from Boston Marathon bombing survivor’s family “I thought it was really interesting that something like this could work.” “After they put on the tilapia skin, it really relieved the pain,” he said. The tilapia treatment also cuts down healing time by up to several days and reduces the use of pain medication, Maciel said.Īntônio dos Santos, a fisherman, was offered the tilapia treatment as part of a clinical trial after he sustained burns to his entire right arm when a gas canister on his boat exploded. For deep second-degree burns, the tilapia bandages must be changed a few times over several weeks of treatment, but still far less often than the gauze with cream. In patients with superficial second-degree burns, the doctors apply the fish skin and leave it until the patient scars naturally. “Another factor we discovered is that the amount of tension, of resistance in tilapia skin is much greater than in human skin. “We got a great surprise when we saw that the amount of collagen proteins, types 1 and 3, which are very important for scarring, exist in large quantities in tilapia skin, even more than in human skin and other skins,” Maciel said. The first step in the research process was to analyze the fish skin. ![]() Unlike the gauze bandages, the sterilized tilapia skin goes on and stays on. In the burn unit at Fortaleza’s José Frota Institute, patients contort as their wounds are unwrapped and washed.Įnter the humble tilapia, a fish that’s widely farmed in Brazil and whose skin, until now, was considered trash. The gauze-and-cream dressing must be changed every day, a painful process. READ MORE: First Look: Plumbing the mysteries of sweat to help burn patients cool their skin “But it doesn’t help in terms of debriding a burn or necessarily helping it heal.” Jeanne Lee, interim burn director at the the regional burn center at the University of California at San Diego. “It’s a burn cream because there’s silver in it, so it prevents the burns from being infected,” said Dr. ![]() Edmar Maciel, a plastic surgeon and burn specialist leading the clinical trials with tilapia skin.Īs a result, public health patients in Brazil are normally bandaged with gauze and silver sulfadiazine cream. The three functional skin banks in Brazil can meet only 1 percent of the national demand, said Dr. But Brazil lacks the human skin, pig skin, and artificial alternatives that are widely available in the US. Animal skin has long been used in the treatment of burns in developed countries. They are covered in fish skin - specifically strips of sterilized tilapia.ĭoctors here are testing the skin of the popular fish as a bandage for second- and third-degree burns. FORTAZELA, Brazil - In this historic city by the sea in northeast Brazil, burn patients look as if they’ve emerged from the waves. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |