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Do you know of any alternative approaches? Are you aware of any similar ones?

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• ArkAngel says:

  22 January | 16:31

  Couldn't resist a quick poke around on the Web to see if I could confirm the story - found this on The Virginian Pilot (University Libraries, Virginia Tech) in Norfolk, Virginia, USA: "Farmers in central Europe used to prevent infection by packing open wounds with fistfuls of cobwebs laced with fungus-grown penicillin."

• Xand_van_Tulleken says:

  26 January | 12:12

  I didn't know that about antibiotic properties of spider silk, and a brief search of the medical literature didn't reveal any papers - though it would be hard to find one that old on line. I have heard a similar story that the romans used to use spiderwebs and moss to heal woulds which does make sense. If you have a large open would then it has to heal from the outer edges in. The healing cells (granulocytes and others) migrate into the middle of the wound, usually under a scab which forms over top to protect the site. In fact wounds heal much better if they are kept clean and moist and there is some sort of fabric for the cells to migrate along. Currently we use paraffin soaked gauze (you can see it in the episode next week!) or occasionally seaweed (alginate) dressings. But I can imagine that moss or spiders webs could provide a similar sort of mesh to help cells move into the wound or protect it (a process called secondary intention) and they may have antibiotic properties as well. This is being investigated - see the abstract below. IN the end they recomend polyurethane films but those don't grow on trees! Local tolerance to spider silks and protein polymers in vivo.Vollrath F, Barth P, Basedow A, Engström W, List H. Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, England. Spider silks were implanted subcutaneously in pigs for a study of the tolerance against this material. Four types of spider silks of high purity and cleanliness were implanted: (i) major ampullate dragline silk reeled from the golden silk spider Nephila clavipes, (ii) native (unsterilised) silk reeled from a Brachypelma spider, (iii) native silk taken from this spider's web and (iv) its web silk thermally treated at 80 degrees C. For comparison we used fibrous silk analogue protein polymers and four already marketed wound dressings (polyurethane film, collagen dressings, gauze pads). All materials were applied epicutaneously to split skin wounds. The implants were examined macroscopically as well as by light microscopy. Superficially, all sites healed rapidly. There were marked inflammatory reactions in all sites with lympho-plasmacellular infiltrations, evidence of phagocytosis and granuloma formation as indicated by the appearance of giant cells. However there was a marked absence of epitheloid cells indicating that the observed reaction was a foreign body granuloma. Furthermore, the histopathological images recorded after 14 days revealed no marked differences between the dressings. Polyurethane films, however, seemed to be superior with respect to the duration of the wound healing process. PMID: 12224131 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

• tincan says:

  21 February | 13:34

  I moved house almost 30 years ago to a house built in the 1920's needing refurbishment. I started to break out in a horrible rash when working on older elements like under floors or behind fireplaces. I went for allergy tests which turned out all negative and i was told to keep a diary to try to identify the cause.I was aware of an allergy to penicillin and while discussing this with my father in law he mentioned that when he lived in a very rural setting they would seek the oldest mouldiest cobwebs when they had an open wound which was not healing. I brought a cobweb to the allergy lab and they confirmed the presence of a penicillin type substance. case solved. For future work I wore full hooded overalls gloves and a mask and managed to complete the product without too many more rashes noel