BioMonde supplies greenbottle larvae for treatment of non-squeamish patients across Europe

Hundreds of UK health service hospitals as well as clinics in Germany are using maggots to clean chronic wounds such as diabetic leg ulcers and speed up the healing process – reviving a centuries-old tradition practised by Maya tribes in Central America and Indigenous Australians.

During the first world war, the US doctor William Baer realised wounds with maggots in them healed much faster than those without. He started growing larvae on a hospital windowsill to treat patients with osteomyelitis, a bone inflammation.

By the end of the 1930s, 300 hospitals in the US and Canada were using maggots, but their use declined with the arrival of penicillin and other antibiotics, only to be rediscovered in the 1990s amid growing antibiotic resistance.