30 Bot Fly

Deal with Health Issues where They Arise.

I always say, when you are in a place and a health issue comes up deal with it at that place. It is there that the locals know what it is, what causes it, and how to cure it. Case in point occurred when Mary, my first wife, and I were in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso, Brazil where I was conducting my dissertation research.

A bot fly had laid an egg in Mary’s thigh and it matured into a grub with a little breathing hole that it kept open. Normally these parasites choose spots on the backs of cattle where it is exposed to the sun. After about six weeks the grub matures and metamorphoses into a fly, which crawls out of the hole. The hole heals after that.

We did not know what the little hole in Mary’s thigh was, and we thought it would heal soon. It looked like an insect bite; it was swollen, oozed but refused to heal regardless of the medication applied to it. The sore continued into the second week and was not any better.

Larva of the bot fly, Dermatobia hominis (Linnaeus Jr.), lateral view. Photograph by Lyle J. Buss, University of Florida 2008.

That weekend we were invited to a friend’s cattle ranch and since Mary was wearing shorts, the lady of the house recognized the sore as a cattle grub larva. We asked, “How do you get rid of it?”

Her husband the rancher had the prefect answer. He got out a slab of bacon and taped it tightly over the hole. In a matter of minutes the grub was feeling suffocated and proceeded to extend its hole up through the inch and a half of bacon. With in an hour the grub had moved out of her leg and into the bacon. The rancher simply removed the bacon with the grub in it and threw it away. Within two days the hole had closed and a week later it was completely healed.

Best Slab of Bacon Ever by Tom Ipri is free licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0                                                                        

In contrast to this simple home remedy, there was a USAID couple from Texas working in Campo Grande and the wife got a cattle grub on her chest just at the top of her cleavage, another place that received a lot of sun light. When Mary told her what it was, she was extremely grossed-out and went into a great panic. No home remedies for her! She wanted the best that medicine could provide and in her opinion that was not in Brazil.

She caught the next plane back home to Houston where she knew the doctors could fix anything. At the University of Houston, the physicians had never seen such a thing and at first were not sure what it was. But they were fascinated with it and wanted to study this strange little alien just under her skin. After about a week they finally figured it out and staged a surgery for the medical students to observe. With an audience of over thirty people staring at her chest, they cut her open and extricated the greasy grub!

It took her a month to convalesce when she eventually got the stitches out. She refused to go back to Brazil after that.

Now, which of these two curing solutions produced the least trauma, the least expense and the least negative attitudinal memory?