When you have a wound on your skin — whether from a casual scrape or in the aftermath of surgery — it’s important to keep it clean and free from bacteria. The last thing you want is to deal with a potential infection because it can compound existing health issues and lead to other debilitating conditions down the line. It’s one of the reasons that plenty of bandages tout their cleanliness and sterility as a selling point.
Putting a bandage on a wound and letting time take its course is a relatively passive response. But what if there was a way to be a bit more aggressive in removing bacteria from the skin around a wound — say, by using electricity to kill bacteria? A recent scientific study of a device known as BLAST showed encouraging results in taking a more active approach to keeping skin clean. As the scientists explain in a paper published in Device, there are numerous medical devices that use electricity to stimulate cells, with “pacemakers and neural stimulators” being two of the most prominent.
“[W]e explored the electrical excitability of Staphylococcus epidermidis, a skin-dwelling bacterium responsible for common clinical infections,” wrote the researchers. “While unresponsive at neutral pH, we found that the bacteria became electrically excitable in the acidic environment of healthy skin.” In order to do this, they developed a device to deliver “bioelectronic localized antimicrobial stimulation therapy,” which proved effective in reducing bacterial growth on pig skin used for initial testing.
Scientists Are Working to Reverse Bacteria’s Immunity to Medication
Researchers are taking several approaches to this challengeAs Live Science’s Emily Cooke reports, the same kind of electrical pulses were also used to reduce the amount of bacteria on a catheter, suggesting a potential alternate or additional use for this device.
“Our bioelectronic treatment not only enables drug-free control of opportunistic pathogens but also demonstrates effectiveness and advantages over drug-based methods,” the scientists wrote in their findings. If these results can be replicated and expanded, it could go a long way towards keeping a lot of people healthier.
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