They healed a newborn’s wound with fish skin: Three years later, the results are stunning

Doctors in Texas were able to save a young girl’s life using a radical new form of treatment when she suffered a serious infection.

Eliana DeVos was born at 23 weeks gestation and weighed just one pound. While at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi, the application of a fish skin treatment proved the key to a heart-warming recovery.

Eliana was kept in neonatal intensive care for 131 days after birth, developing a life-threatening infection on her neck. The severity of the wound meant that her body developed sepsis, a reaction to infection that caused some of her organs to shut down.

As her stay in the neonatal intensive care unit wore on, doctors suggested a strange new treatment that could help her recovery: fish skin.

“It’s microscopically so close to human skin that it helps the wound start to heal,” explained Dr. Vanessa Dimas, one of Eliana’s surgeons at Driscoll.

“She was a premature baby, the wound was very extensive, and she was pretty sick, so I did not feel like it was safe to do a surgical procedure on her,” Dimas said.

Doctors knew that they would need to remove the buildup of dead skin tissue from Eliana’s wound and then cover it with a treatment to encourage the good skin tissue to regrow. However an infant as small as Eliana was unable to receive a more traditional skin graft treatment, so they had to look elsewhere.

Dimas and her team used medical-grade honey to cleanse and disinfect the wound, before applying a fish skin mix to cover the affected area. The fish skin provided a bridge over the wound and the omega oils and other nutrients actually helped in the healing process.

The fish skin mixture provided a vital cover for the cleansed wound and, once the recovery process had begun, essentially melted away to be absorbed by the body. Of course the treatment is not without risk. An unknown fish allergy could prove extremely dangerous in a young, sick child.

But given the severity of her condition doctors felt it was worth the risk and they were rewarded with an astonishing recovery. Within three days of the treatment Eliana had a “full-thickness wound” and the area was essentially healed within 10 days.

Now three years old Eliana is a healthy child with barely any signs of the ordeal that she had been through in her first weeks on the planet. Speaking now her mother, Krystal DeVos, was glad to have tried the experimental treatment.

“Never be fearful to try something new. Always be open-minded and just have faith,” she said. “If something sounds different or you’ve never been exposed to it before, just take a chance and have a little faith. And in our case, it worked out really great.”

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