Mosquito nets safe to use in hernia repair
Sterilised mosquito nets can replace surgical meshes in repairing groin hernias. Surgical meshes are often expensive which makes mosquito nets a good alternative for patients in low-income countries.
Inguinal or groin hernia is a hole in the abdominal wall surrounding the groin. Fat, intestines and other organs may form a sack-like protrusion around the hole. The only treatment for groin hernias is surgery. Almost 200 million groin hernia patients don’t undergo surgery, one of the reasons being the expensive meshes.
“Commercial hernia meshes cost 100 dollars or more, which is too much for the health services and people living in poor countries,” says Dr Jenny Löfgren, researcher at the Department of Surgical and Perioperative Sciences, Umeå University in Sweden. “So instead, doctors and surgeons in several countries have been using mosquito nets, but whether they are effective and safe hasn’t been given sufficient study until now.”
Dr. Löfgren and her colleagues performed surgery on 300 adult males from Uganda suffering from groin hernia. They were randomly assigned to get either mosquito net or surgical mesh. The results show that mosquito nets worked fine as an alternative to mesh.
“These results are of great potential benefit to the many millions of people who lack access to good surgical care for their hernias,” says study project leader and surgeon Dr Andreas Wladis, associate professor at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Science and Education at Stockholm South General (Söder) Hospital. “The next step will be to motivate greater resource allocation to treat hernia patients and plan for how mosquito nets could be used for hernia surgery on a larger scale.”
The study was published in the ‘New England Journal of Medicine’ (NEJM).
Category: Features, Wellness and Complementary Therapies
