WEDNESDAY, April 24, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Nothing's more natural than taking your tongue to a cut, but German scientists have found a good reason to think twice about licking your wounds.
Infection experts in Nordhorn report the strange case of a middle-aged diabetic man who lost part of his thumb to a minor cut after evidently contaminating the wound with flesh-eating bacteria -- simply by sucking on it.
The incident, which occurred last year, appears in a letter in tomorrow's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The man, who suffered from Type I diabetes, was in a bicycle accident in which he suffered a dislocated thumb with a minor cut.
Doctors repositioned the thumb, and sent the man home. Three days later, he was back, this time with a fever and an angrily swollen right hand.
Surgery was performed immediately, and tissue samples from the area revealed flesh-eating germs, a condition known as necrotizing fasciitis. Although doctors were able to calm the systemic infection with more antibiotics, the thumb remained under attack -- and four weeks later it had to be lopped off at the last joint.
Two of the bugs found in lab tests were Eikenella corrodens, a common tenant of the oral cavity, and Streptococcus anginosus. E. corrodens has been known to cause infections in people who've suffered oral cuts after being punched in the mouth, although in this case sucking alone seems to have given it an opening for damage.
Diabetes may have had something to do with the man's condition. Elevated blood sugar can paralyze infection-fighting white blood cells, weakening the defenses against microbes.
Dr. Ulrich Fischer-Brugge, of the Labor Centrum Nordhorn -- the lab that analyzed the man's tissue samples -- says in the last three years he has seen five cases of infection linked to wound licking. As instinctive as the habit may be, "it's not a normal way of wound healing," he says.
Although Fischer-Brugge's group cautioned against wound licking after a cut, other scientists have found that saliva may carry its own antimicrobial ointment: nitric oxide.
In the late 1990s, British scientists reported that saliva contains nitrate, which can be converted into nitric oxide, and that skin levels of the gas spiked when people licked themselves.
Mark H. Schoenfisch, a chemist at the University of North Carolina, says nitric oxide can trigger cell death in bacteria. And researchers have shown that people fighting infection exhale more of the gas than those who are healthy, he adds.
What To Do
To learn more about flesh-eating bacteria, check out this site from the British Columbia Ministry of Health.
To find out more about nitric oxide, visit the National Academy of Sciences.
