From MSNBC.COM: 

New dressings feature bug juice to heal wounds

Treatment mimics benefits of maggots minus the ‘yuck’ factor, study says

Scientists in England are developing new dressings for wounds designed to mimic maggots to clean away dead tissue and promote healing.

The ancient use of living maggots in non-healing wounds — to eat away only the dead tissue and encourage regeneration — was extensive prior to World War II, before penicillin became popular. Lately the practice has seen a resurgence among doctors.

At any given point in time millions of patients worldwide are getting treated for intractable skin wounds, but many are reluctant to try maggots because of “the obvious ‘yuck’ factor,” researcher Stephen Britland, a cell biologist at Bradford University in England, told LiveScience.

Instead of using live maggots, the scientists developed a new wound dressing impregnated with purified excretions and secretions from live greenbottle blowfly larvae.

(more here)