The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has for the first time cleared the commercial marketing of leeches for medicinal purposes. … Leeches have been used as an alternative treatment to blood-letting and amputation for several thousand years. They reached their height of medicinal use in the mid- 1800?s. Today they are used in medicine throughout the world as tools in skin grafts and reattachment surgery.
So begins a press release from the United States Food and Drug Administration. Read the entire, brief document here.
Many doctors will now be confronted, for the first time, with the occasional problem of leeches that are not hungry when called upon for duty. How does one stimulate the appetite of a leech? Anders Barheim and Hogne Sandvik of the University of Bergen, Norway, won the 1996 Ig Nobel Biology Prize for providing the answer. See details here, and read their Prize-winning report here.