I am a doctor who has treated patients with myiasis and would love to talk if that helps. As a physician in India, Myiasis as a surgical case is not uncommon, whereas it is unheard of in developed countries (I now know this might be because of the Panama worm-border in North America; previously, I just assumed it was better standards of living). You are not overindexing the ‘yuck’ factor of it, in fact, dial it up. I can tell a patient has worms in their wounds from over a mile away (not literally); the stench adds to social stigma for the patient and makes it harder to seek treatment. I remember being the only person in a group of five assigned a patient stepping forward to dress a wound (I won’t go into details of how that’s done here) because I was the only person not retching uncontrollably. That patient was just an orphan kid who fell, scraped his knee pretty badly a couple of days ago, and never paid attention to the flies because flies are everywhere where he lives. The lethal cases do not differ much from what you would see in a zombie/horror movie. It’s just wild to think that in this day and age, there are still people (and animals) being eaten by worms alive.
I wonder if a great additional question here is “How many humans would it help and how much?” Is it the same worm? What is the current estimate of the global disease burden, DALYs? Prima facie, it would seem that it is a slam dunk—kill two birds with a stone— health + animal welfare with a single intervention, but it is not discussed as such yet, which makes me think that either the two don’t overlap or just hasn’t been looked into it like that. If we assume human suffering gets more policy traction/funding than wild animal suffering, it seems beneficial to explore this.
I am a doctor who has treated patients with myiasis and would love to talk if that helps. As a physician in India, Myiasis as a surgical case is not uncommon, whereas it is unheard of in developed countries (I now know this might be because of the Panama worm-border in North America; previously, I just assumed it was better standards of living). You are not overindexing the ‘yuck’ factor of it, in fact, dial it up. I can tell a patient has worms in their wounds from over a mile away (not literally); the stench adds to social stigma for the patient and makes it harder to seek treatment. I remember being the only person in a group of five assigned a patient stepping forward to dress a wound (I won’t go into details of how that’s done here) because I was the only person not retching uncontrollably. That patient was just an orphan kid who fell, scraped his knee pretty badly a couple of days ago, and never paid attention to the flies because flies are everywhere where he lives. The lethal cases do not differ much from what you would see in a zombie/horror movie. It’s just wild to think that in this day and age, there are still people (and animals) being eaten by worms alive.
I wonder if a great additional question here is “How many humans would it help and how much?” Is it the same worm? What is the current estimate of the global disease burden, DALYs? Prima facie, it would seem that it is a slam dunk—kill two birds with a stone— health + animal welfare with a single intervention, but it is not discussed as such yet, which makes me think that either the two don’t overlap or just hasn’t been looked into it like that. If we assume human suffering gets more policy traction/funding than wild animal suffering, it seems beneficial to explore this.