04-06-2025
Premature baby girl's life-threatening 'flesh-heating disease' wound healed with fish skin
Eliana DeVos was struck down with a serious, fast-spreading infection after being born extremely premature
Welcoming a child into the world is a beautiful time but can also be worrying for parents if things don't necessarily go according to plan. If your baby's born before 37 weeks, they're said to be premature.
Premature babies are likely to be small and may have health issues. But one baby girl who burst into the world before her due date suffered a few more difficulties than others - and what cured her is utterly fascinating.
Eliana DeVos, from Texas, USA, was born extremely premature at 23 weeks and weighing just one pound. She spent 131 days in neonatal intensive care, where she developed a severe, fast-spreading infection on her neck.
The infection led to sepsis, a dangerous condition that can shut down the organs.
As her condition worsened, her family and doctors looked for anything that might help.
Doctors say the infection nearly took her life. And the thing that ended up saving her? Fish skin.
"It was almost like a flesh-eating disease," her mother told CNN. "Her body was attacking something in her neck."
That's when doctors came up with a new alternative - using fish skin to help her wound heal.
Dr Vanessa Dimas, a paediatric plastic surgeon, said Eliana was too fragile for surgery or a human skin graft.
Instead, she and wound care nurse practitioner Roxana Reyna used a medical honey solution to clean the wound. Then they added fish skin, a medical product made from wild North Atlantic cod, to help it close and heal.
The fish skin—made by the Icelandic company Kerecis—acts like a scaffold, helping new skin tissue grow.
It's close to human skin in structure and contains omega oils and other natural healing elements.
"Once it basically does its job helping the wound heal, it sort of just melts away," Dimas said.
In Eliana's case, the results came quickly.
After just three days, doctors noticed "dramatic" improvements. They changed her dressings every three days and ten days after the first fish skin treatment, her wound had closed—with little scarring and no surgery, CNN reported.
"There were no adverse reactions," Dimas and Reyna wrote in a report presented in March at the European Wound Management Association Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
Doctors say Eliana was probably the first premature baby so small to receive this treatment.
Her scare is barely visible three years on.
Fish skin has been used for wound care around the world, but not often in children, and especially not in babies as small as Eliana.
Animal tissue has become a promising candidate for wound healing due to factors including their abundant sources, low side-effect profiles, exceptional bioactivity, and biocompatibility, according to the National Library of Medicine.
Other tissue can come from animals like pigs or cows.
Although they don't replace skin, they can act as temporary dressing to keep a wound clean and help healing begin.
A caveat to the process is that not all wounds heal with these methods, and medics must be careful of allergies, especially to fish. This is especially pertinent in babies because it's not always obvious when they have allergies.
"That would be the biggest risk - an unknown allergy that could potentially cause some problems," Dimas added.
"Other than that, there's still a chance that the kid may need surgery, because we don't know how much this is going to help us heal the child."
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