Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (41 page)

The last few years brought one major design change to golf tees—also developed by a dentist. (At this point, we have to wonder whether or not all this dental golf inventiveness had more to do with technical expertise or time spent on the green.) Dr. Arnold DiLaura invented the Sof-Tee which allowed the tee to sit on top of the ground rather than burrow into it.

Others updated traditional flared tees. There’s a metal, zero-friction tee; flavored tees (yes, wooden tees that can be sucked on like toothpicks); and high-performance FlexTees.

Of course, the magic of any golf tee—old, new, metal, plastic, plain or grape-flavored—is that it just might promise a great shot. No wonder it took golfers nearly 300 years to change from sandy tee boxes to a wooden peg, and another 70 or 80 years to try something different. There’s no tee like a tried-and-true tee.

Maggots and Leeches

A few hundred years ago, leeches seemed like the answer to everything that ailed a person. Whether it be fever, flu, headaches, hemorrhoids, or something else—a little bloodletting would clear the problem right up. The first documented use of leeches was by Hippocrates in the 5th century B.C., but the worms’ medicinal use is believed to predate even that.

Although maggots have not been used medicinally as long, they have been used for hundreds of years to clean out wounds and prevent infection. They were especially in vogue in the 19th century, before the development of antibiotics. In the 1920s, maggots were often used by U.S. doctors to treat tuberculosis and bone marrow bacterial infections. By the 1940s, the medical community had abandoned them in favor or surgical and medicinal treatments.

Now, both leeches and maggots have staged comebacks and are rising stars in the medical community. In July 2005, the FDA classified them as medical devices, which—like a stethoscope or a defibrillator—means that maggots and leeches can now be used for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes, and doctors across the country are now ordering maggots to the tune of up to 5,000 per week.

Maggots are involved in a process called
debridement
, the removal of dead or diseased tissue to allow healthy tissue to grow or for semihealthy tissue to repair itself. Maggots work so well because
they eat only dead tissue—they have no interest in healthy living tissue. Plus, they excrete a substance that includes an antibiotic that helps clean wounds and keeps out bacteria.

A maggot’s performance in treating a wound is actually better than a human surgeon’s because the insect stops as soon as it comes across healthy tissue. A surgeon doesn’t have the ability to be that precise; when a surgeon cuts away dead tissue, he always takes away good tissue, too.

Maggot debridement lasts two or three days on most wounds. The tiny 1 mm-long maggots are put in the affected area, a gauze pad is placed over it to keep them from wandering off, and they get busy doing what they do best—eating. Patients come back at the end of the treatment and the gauze is removed. So people worried about maggots turning into long-term visitors can relax. The maggots are easy to get rid of—after gorging themselves, they become 10 times bigger in size and are eager to leave the wound. The maggots won’t stay where they can’t eat (or breathe—they need oxygen).

Medicinal maggots are the larvae of green blowflies, and because they’re grown in a laboratory, they’re sterile when applied. Patients typically don’t feel them wiggling their way around. Instead, patients usually describe the sensation as “tickling.” Some patients have reported they do feel it when the maggots eat tissue that’s a little too close to healthy tissue or when they move around an exposed nerve.

It’s a small price to pay for most patients treated with maggots, who otherwise run the risk of losing valuable limbs or appendages. If an injury or skin lesion gets really bad, amputation may be required, so maggot treatment is usually the last resort to prevent the loss of an appendage. Even though most patients are squeamish at first, they get over it when they consider the alternative.

Leeches were first used for medicinal purposes in Egypt some 2,500 years ago. They’ve come a long way since then. Today, they serve humans best by getting rid of excess blood left over after surgical
reattachments, skin grafts, and plastic or reconstructive surgery. One long-problematic portion of these surgeries was the complication of reconnecting veins, the vessels that carry blood to the heart. Arteries have thicker walls and cause surgeons fewer problems, but veins often tear and resist suturing. Tears in the vein lead to pools of blood inside the body that form clots and can kill off tissue.

Leeches are designed perfectly for the cleanup job. Their saliva has almost three dozen proteins that, in combination, numb the body to pain, keep swelling down, and provide a remarkably long-lasting anticoagulant so that the blood keeps flowing. A leech may have had his fill after just an hour, but the blood will continue flowing for several hours longer. After the leeches drop off, they are usually too fat to move and are, as far as the medical community is concerned, infectious waste. They’re thrown into an alcohol solution to kill them and then disposed of, just like used needles.

Leeches are medical marvels. Scientists are trying to understand how their anticoagulation works so it can applied to other health problems like heart attacks and strokes, where blood clots cause life-threatening injury to people. And leeches have been used for treating inflammations, arthritis, glaucoma, infertility, tendinitis, embolisms, and a variety of rheumatoid and venal disorders.

The largest distributor of medical leeches in the United States is a New York-based company called Leeches USA, the distributor for a French company that gained FDA approval to sell leeches in the United States in 2004. The company sells the bloodsuckers for about $10 apiece (with volume discounts), selling about 30,000 critters a year to doctors around the country.

Although there’s been a resurgence in the use of maggots and leeches, patients and the medical community have been slow to embrace them. Though their benefits and uses are well documented, squeamishness and a general “ick” factor make many turn away.

Currently, about 200 hospitals across the United States and Europe prescribe maggots and leeches, but more are coming around. It may not be pretty, but when the alternative is loss of a limb (or death), no one seems to mind. Turns out maggots and leeches aren’t just for the Dark Ages anymore.

Carbon Offsetting

Dire warnings from scientists, the success of the cautionary film
An Inconvenient Truth
, and endless speculative coverage in the media have motivated many people to seek ways to minimize their carbon “footprint”—their impact on the natural world. That impact comes in all sizes: According to the footprint calculator on the Web site Green Progress for a Green Future, every 100 miles of air travel nets a carbon footprint of 44 pounds because of the carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) pumped into the atmosphere. And driving a regular car 12,000 miles each year leaves behind about 3.5 tons. So to combat that problem, many people and businesses are turning to carbon offsetting.

The companies selling carbon offsets do things to counteract the purchaser’s footprint . . . planting trees or investing in renewable energy, for example. They might also pay developing countries to not produce CO
₂
. Anyone can buy the offsets—from countries to businesses to individuals—and the prices are typically set per metric ton of CO
₂
.

Carbon offsetting gained prominence after the Kyoto Protocol was ratified on February 16, 2005. Kyoto was an international agreement (backed by more than 140 countries, though not by the United States) that was committed to reducing greenhouse
gases and other environmental problems worldwide. One part of the agreement allowed governments and companies to earn carbon offsets as credits that they could sell to each other. When Kyoto began, a ton of CO
₂
was worth about 8 euros. Within a year, the price had tripled, but countries kept buying them. Japan and the Netherlands, in particular, bought from markets in Asia and Latin America. London bought more carbon offsets than any other city.

Sounds great, right? But lots of people aren’t fans of the process. In particular, the European Union (EU), the largest buyer of carbon offsetting, has suggested that developing nations haven’t done enough to offset their carbon footprints. In 2008, the EU announced that it wanted developing nations to cut their CO
₂
production. But the developing nations don’t think they should shoulder the burden. From their point of view, the developed countries have benefited and profited from environmentally unfriendly practices for years before penalties were in place. Developing nations argue that they shouldn’t be forced to comply with the new regulations while they’re still up and coming.

The resistance doesn’t stop there. Environmental groups haven’t been quick to embrace carbon offsetting, either. In 2007, a U.K.-based environmental group called Friends of the Earth issued a press release that said, “a number of other organizations [are] becoming increasingly concerned that carbon offsetting is being used as a smoke-screen to ward off legislation and delay the urgent action needed to cut emissions and develop alternative low-carbon solutions.” Environmentalists fear that, by allowing countries, businesses, and individuals to offset their carbon footprint by paying someone else to plant trees or invest in renewable energy, the practice encourages people not to take responsibility for their effect on the environment.

Other environmentalists maintain that carbon offsetting doesn’t do enough to stop global warming anyway. Even if all the carbon emitted by First World nations were offset by Third World nations, they say, it wouldn’t be enough to solve the problem.

Some government agencies are also against it—they worry that
the business of carbon trading could easily turn corrupt. In January 2008, California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. asked the Federal Trade Commission to start regulating the carbon trading business. Attorneys general from nine different states joined him.

One major problem they found was that people were paying for carbon they hadn’t even emitted yet. The idea behind carbon trading involves stopping future carbon emission, but there are no clear guidelines about how it should be carried out. Thus, carbon trading could become a shady business with no clear-cut rules. “Currently, the market for these offsets is volatile, largely unregulated, and has serious potential for fraud,” Brown said.

Instead of carbon offsetting, environmentalists recommend changing the way people act so that we all create less CO
₂
. Most people agree that would be ideal. But in the meantime, carbon trading continues to grow as an industry—a 2007
New York Times
article noted that carbon trading is now a $30 billion business worldwide and could grow to a $1 trillion industry by 2017.

People want an easy-to-follow solution so they can feel better in the knowledge they’re helping to take care of the problem. But carbon offsetting may need to go back to the drawing board before it becomes the answer that environmentalists are calling for.