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The medicinal uses of insects and other arthropods worldwide have been reviewed by Meyer-Rochow, [1] who provides examples of all major insect groups, spiders, worms and molluscs and discusses their potential as suppliers of bioactive components. Using insects (and spiders) to treat various maladies and injuries has a long tradition and, having ...
The "Spanish fly", Lytta vesicatoria, has been considered to have medicinal, aphrodisiac, and other properties. Human interactions with insects include both a wide variety of uses, whether practical such as for food, textiles, and dyestuffs, or symbolic, as in art, music, and literature, and negative interactions including damage to crops and extensive efforts to control insect pests.
Different non-human animals unwillingly help humans with creating medicine that can treat certain human diseases. For example, the anticoagulant properties of snake venom are key to potential medical use. These toxins can be used to treat heart disease, pulmonary embolism, and many other diseases, all of which may originate from blood clots.
Maggot therapy (also known as larval therapy) is a type of biotherapy involving the introduction of live, disinfected maggots (fly larvae) into non-healing skin and soft-tissue wounds of a human or other animal for the purpose of cleaning out the necrotic (dead) tissue within a wound (debridement), and disinfection. There is evidence that ...
The discipline of medical entomology, or public health entomology, and also veterinary entomology is focused upon insects and arthropods that impact human health. Veterinary entomology is included in this category, because many animal diseases can "jump species" and become a human health threat, for example, bovine encephalitis.
Pliny also noted the medicinal use of leeches in ancient Rome, stating that they were often used for gout, and that patients became addicted to the treatment. [62] In Old English, lǣce was the name for a physician as well as for the animal, though the words had different origins, and lǣcecraft, leechcraft, was the art of healing. [63]
The arthropods are a phylum of animals with jointed legs; they include the insects, arachnids such as spiders, myriapods, and crustaceans. [1] Insects play many roles in culture including their direct use as food, [2] in medicine, [3] for dyestuffs, [4] and in science, where the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster serves as a model organism for work in genetics and developmental biology.
A separate issue is the use of testing on animals as a means of initial testing during drug development, or actual production. [40] Guiding principles for more ethical use of animals in testing are the Three Rs first described by Russell and Burch in 1959. [41] These principles are now followed in many testing establishments worldwide.