DAY ONE

Robertsons Fishing Tackle in Dagenham, East London is a vast establishment. A maze of hooks and chairs and various little sections presumably dedicated to more niche aspects of the hobby. I have no fucking clue what anything is, but I’m here for one reason only.

“Hi, I spoke to you on the phone?” I say to the guy behind the counter. “I’m here for the pink maggots.”

I only need one, to raise as one would a child, but he shunts about 70 my way. Apparently it’s not possible to buy single-digit quantities of maggots. “Could they escape?” I ask. This makes a Robertsons regular wearing a Gucci sidebag laugh. I ask a lot of questions, but the important facts are these: there are two types of maggots—actual “pinkies” (greenbottle larvae) and maggots that have been dyed pink. The more I take, the better my chances are of producing a fly. I don’t need to feed them. 

I emerge from Robertsons with a green tackle box containing a mix of both types of pink maggot, squirming around in a load of sawdust to “stop them smelling.”

Back home, I separate four (two of each variety) into individual containers. The pinkies are named Howard and Gary, the dyed maggots Robbie and Mark. The main one is obviously Robbie. The 60 left in the tackle box are dubbed “the hive,” which I scrawl on a label.

I leave my children to settle in.

DAY TWO

I’m drawn to Howard. To the untrained eye he is dead, but when I give his pot a shake he springs into action, writhing around before burrowing away again. He looks cozy. If he were a human, he would be tucked beneath a blanket burning a candle with an autumn-themed scent. 

Checking on the hive is my least favorite task. The maggots make the sawdust undulate and looking at it too long makes you feel like you’re tripping. It’s also hard to gauge what the atmosphere is. Is there a sense of freedom in the air? Or have I callously separated them from their maggot brothers over at Robertsons? The hive is the perfect microcosm of society. Some will take things in their stride. Others will go to therapy in their twenties.

In classic performing monkey style, Robbie comes alive as soon as I move his pot. He can’t help but entertain.

Mark has something stuck to his arse. He seems embarrassed and wriggles away as quickly as he can.

Gary’s still hanging in there. Shame. 

DAY THREE

I wake myself up at 2AM audibly groaning. I’d been having a nightmare about the maggots doubling in size and becoming quite menacing. Before bed I’d asked a man on Instagram who’s into fishing for advice, and he told me a story about a maggot factory near him that stinks due to the rotting cow flesh they feed them. I begin to regret this whole thing, by which I mean my life.

DAY FOUR

There’s a good vibe in the hive today. If it were a club, I’d walk in and be like, “Okay, this is cool.” I’d stay for at least three drinks. It’s nice to see some actual pinkies still knocking about, too. They’re considerably smaller than the dyed maggots and the obvious underdogs, but it’s very “one love” in the hive.

Over in his pot on the kitchen counter (where else would you keep them?), Robbie stirs.

“Before bed I’d asked a man on Instagram who’s into fishing for advice, and he told me a story about a maggot factory near him that stinks due to the rotting cow flesh they feed them”

DAY six 

We’ve hit a critical point. Either all my maggots are dead, or they’ve entered the chrysalis stage. They’re no longer pink and wriggly, but still and brown. I call up Robertsons. The man that answers asks if I’m the one feeding them to spiders. “No, I’m the one that’s raising them,” I reply.

He confirms what I fear: flies are on the horizon. I must get rid of the hive. I feel bad that I didn’t spend more time with Robbie when he stirred yesterday. He clearly must have known. 

DAY seven

I dump the hive in a bin in Hackney Wick. It might constitute bioterrorism, but that’s not my problem. 

DAY eight

Howard lies awake, his eyes boring into the dark (of his chrysalis). He knows the hive is gone. ‘Why have I been chosen to stay?’ he thinks. ‘Am I next?’

DAY ELEVEN

There hasn’t been much activity the last few days. Without thinking, I go into the kitchen, pick up Gary’s pot, and give it a shake. It is second nature, like when a mother involuntarily produces breast milk when a baby looks in her direction.

“I dump the hive in a bin in Hackney Wick. It might constitute bioterrorism, but that’s not my problem”

DAY THIRTEEN

Oh my fucking God. 

There, in Howard and Gary’s tubs, are fat bluebottle flies. They’re surprisingly still, adjusting to the addition of six legs. Howard callously steps over his chrysalis as he limps around his tub, desperate to get out. Gary’s always rubbing his hands together, like he’s up to something. I must release them. There’s so much rotten food and dog shit out there calling their name.

I imagine myself opening their lids and one of them will land on my arm, like a bird, wanting to snuggle into my bosom one last time. I open their lids and they just fly off.

DAY FOURTEEN

Mark is fucking huge. ‘Now this is a fly,’ I think to myself. If someone were to draw a fly from memory, they would draw Mark. 

I free him without much ceremony then rush back inside. Robbie is hatching. 

It’s nauseating. Robbie uses this horrific semi-translucent sac to push his way out. There’s a lot of flailing. He finally emerges, but something is wrong. He’s still very maggot-like, like he might be undercooked. I desperately give the pot a few shakes. He lays motionless on his back. I fear that Robbie has died.

DAY FIFTEEN

Robbie lives! He is a fly! However, his back legs are lame. They drag behind him, slightly mangled. There’s a bit of matter from his chrysalis that he’s failed to get rid of stuck to one of them. I contemplate intervening with tweezers, then remember that he’s a fly. “Survival of the fittest,” my flatmate reminds me.

I take Robbie outside and gently shake him from his pot. He drags himself around in the rain, unable to fly. “I think he’ll die soon,” my flatmate says. The mood is somber.

Suddenly, Robbie takes off. He soars high into the sky until he becomes but a speck in the distance. ‘Goodbye,’ I think. Then I realize he’s getting closer. I can see his translucent wings fluttering. His red eyes come into focus. We are face to face. “Thank you,” he whispers. We linger for a moment like this, before he takes to the skies once again.

“Amber?”

I jolt back to reality. 

“What are you thinking about?” my flatmate asks.

“Oh, nothing,” I reply. I turn my attention back to the ground. There’s Robbie, still lumbering along. 

Robbie ‘The Maggot’ Maggit passed away, Saturday, September 6, 2025. He was born a maggot but died a fly, fulfilling his destiny, and achieving the ultimate honor of his people.

Follow Amber on Instagram: @amberawlings

This story is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.

The post In Honor of Deftones, I Raised My Very Own Pet Pink Maggits appeared first on VICE.

The woman, surnamed Li, was in the recovery stages of lung cancer when a friend suggested that eating a bunch of maggots could completely eliminate the growth from her body, according to The Epoch Times. This friend claimed to have previously treated a malignant tumour using the same folk remedy. So Li thought she’d give it a go. And then Li got very, very sick.

When she started complaining of severe chest pains, acid reflux, and heartburn, doctors at the Xi’an City-Central Hospital, in Shaangxi Province, suspected that Li’s cancer had relapsed. After already having undergone a bevy of more conventional treatments including surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, she’d appeared to be on the road to recovery—but these new symptoms prompted some follow-up assessments.

“The first thing we wondered was, did it [the cancer] metastasize?” said Wang Zheng, head of the hospital’s Oncology Department. “So we used the standard assessment process for tumours and gave her a complete evaluation.”

Doctors found that Li’s situation was completely stable. “There weren’t any traces of the tumour relapsing or metastasizing,” according to Wang. So they performed an endoscopy and had a look in her stomach.

“We discovered that there were parasites in her intestines, and what’s more is that they were still moving,” said Wang. “Finally, after we asked the patient in detail [about her condition], the patient told us that one month ago, she swallowed a bottle of maggots.”

Doctors promptly administered medicine to kill the maggots, and by the next day Li’s pain was gone. She has since left the hospital and is following doctor’s instructions. But she isn’t the only person to have been hospitalised in recent times as a result of a snake oil folk remedy.

More recently, a woman in Hunan province caused damage to many of her internal organs after hooking herself up to an intravenous drip and administering fruit juice directly into her bloodstream, The Epoch Times reports. The woman—surnamed Zeng—claimed she “had thought that fresh fruit juice had plentiful health benefits.” She was rushed to a university’s intensive care unit, where it was found that her body’s ability to clot blood was blocked and she was diagnosed with sepsis. She made a full recovery.

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The post A Woman in China Tried to Cure Her Cancer by Swallowing Maggots appeared first on VICE.

The feeding frenzy—the maggots scarfed down the whole pie in two hours—was documented in a time-lapse video, and described in a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Researchers led by Olga Shishkov, a mechanical engineering PhD student at Georgia Tech, devised the experiment to examine the amazing eating powers of black soldier fly larvae.

Black soldier flies have a lot of potential as biological composters and waste recyclers because of their eating skills, and the species is not a pest or a vector for disease.

These baby flies are the Joey Chestnuts of the maggot world. They can eat twice their body weight in one day and they gorge at an accelerated rate compared to their larval competitors.

It turns out the maggots create a “fountain of larvae” on the pizza, in the words of the authors.

“Larvae crawl towards the food from below, feed, and then are expelled on the top layer,” Shishkov’s team said. “This self-propagating flow pushes away potential roadblocks, thereby increasing eating rate.”

This isn’t the first time Shishkov and her colleagues have filmed black soldier fly larvae pigging out. In 2018 for Valentine’s Day, the team fed a heart-shaped donut with a happy face to 5,000 maggots.

Watch Gizmodo’s footage of the pastry’s eerie disintegration, but be prepared to stare into the eyes of the donut long after they have been removed from its face to be passed among the ravenous larvae.

These maggots also make a great protein source for livestock feed—and are edible to humans too. In fact, industrial designer Katarina Unger invented an incubator farm that raises the larvae for food.

Read More: A Scientist Has a Solution to Antibiotic Resistance—Genetically Modified Maggots

“When you cook them, they smell a bit like cooked potatoes,” Unger told the architectural and design magazine Dezeen. “The consistency is a bit harder on the outside and like soft meat on the inside. The taste is nutty and a bit meaty.”

Perhaps “pizza-loving maggots” will morph into “maggot-lovers pizza” in the near future.

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The post Watch 10,000 Maggots Scarf Down a Pizza in Two Hours appeared first on VICE.

Clinical professionals have been sticking grubs in people’s festering wounds since at least World War One, and there are about 1300 centres around the US, UK, and Europe that currently offer the treatment. In Australia, Sydney’s Westmead Hospital is the only supplier of sterile maggots, the ABC reports—often used as a last resort treatment for patients who have exhausted all other options. But Frank wants that to change: he wants the practice to become a go-to remedy for people around the country who are suffering chronic wounds.

“Maggots are fantastic,” he says. “They eat all the dead and decaying tissue in the wound… [and] remove bacteria by eating them and digesting them, and through their excretions and secretions that they place into the wound.”

Frank explains that these “anti-microbial” properties of the humble maggot keep the infection under control and allow the body to properly heal the wound. The process is known as “debridement”: the removal of dead or infected tissue that in turn improves the healing potential of the healthy tissue. The maggot then disinfects the wound by secreting anti-bacterial substances, and stimulates the production of new, fresh capillaries over the top.

It is, in Frank’s words, a “life and limb-saving” practice—and one that he suggests will only become more valuable as patients’ resistance to antibiotics increases. “Penicillin is losing its potency in the era of antibiotic resistance,” he points out. “Maggot therapy has been efficient in antibiotic resistant infections like staph infections.”

The maggots used in therapy are sterile, harvested from a pre-established fly colony, and typically the treatment itself involves the larvae being applied directly to the affected area and held in place under a fly screen-like dressing. Dermatologist website Dermnet NZ explains that this can be a painful process, especially as the maggots fatten up on all that dead flesh and grow in the scab. Moreover, they warn that “wounds should never be allowed to close over the maggots.” After only two to four days of chowing down, all maggots need to be removed. But the results, says Frank, are “fantastic”.

“In many cases today when people present to hospital with maggot-infested wounds, the health care professionals have to admit that the wounds look perfect,” he says. “They look fine.”

The post An Aussie Researcher Insists Maggots Are the Best Way to Heal Wounds appeared first on VICE.

This is the line of thinking I sold myself when I set out to eat casu marzu, the famously rotten cheese of Sardinia that is infested with live maggots. It’s just another form of decay, and I eat decaying cheese all the time. Maggot cheese isn’t that different.

That’s the story I’m going with.

For residents of Sardinia, Italy’s second-largest island, casu marzu (literally “rotten cheese”) is much more than a culinary curiosity—it’s part of their cultural heritage. The sheep’s milk cheese gets its flavor and texture thanks to live maggots, who eat the cheese, digest it, and then… expel an acid that causes the hard cheese to break down and become spreadable. The maggots can be introduced deliberately by cutting a hole in the top of a hard wheel of pecorino and pouring in milk—which, when spoiled, acts like a red carpet rolled out for flies who will lay eggs that will hatch into maggots. But more often, a wheel of casu marzu is a happy accident—happy, if you like maggot cheese, that is—that results from a random fly laying her eggs before the cheese rind is fully formed.

The cheese has been consumed on Sardinia for centuries, and harkens back to the island’s shepherding traditions and the necessity of adapting foodways in a land of limited resources and hardscrabble existence. Maggots infested your cheese? You eat it anyway. But to the European Union food health authority, casu marzu is a creamy, squirmy wheel of intestinal parasites waiting to happen—commercial production and sale of the cheese have been banned since the 1990s. Some Sards may have been outraged, but as my Sardinian-born friend Vanni reasons, “It’s rotten. You can’t sell food that’s rotten.”

These days, there’s an ongoing effort to get casu marzu declared a traditional food and therefore exempt from EU food laws, as well as studies to produce it in a controlled environment—with sanitary flies that haven’t potentially just flown from dog poop. For now, the EU appears to turn a blind eye to casual production of casu marzu, but you can only find the cheese on Sardinia if you make it yourself, or if you know a guy who knows a guy.

Vanni (who doesn’t want his last name included in a story about his access to illegal cheese) is my guy-who-knows-a-guy. When I expressed curiosity about casu marzu, his eyes danced. “I’ll get some. Next time I come back from Sardinia, we’ll eat it.”

Hold up. I just said I was curious to learn more, not that I necessarily wanted to eat wormy cheese. I’m curious about the Black Death too, but for that I’d rather just read a book. Still, I knew if Vanni said he was going to bring back casu marzu, he was going to bring back casu marzu. And once I was faced with this fabled, forbidden cheese I couldn’t not taste it, right?

Sure enough, as soon as Vanni arrived in our little Umbrian hilltown for the summer, he popped up on Messenger to ask when I wanted to come over for maggots and cheese. I implored my husband—a man who hates even cheese that doesn’t have live worms in it—to come with me for moral support and was met with a cheerful “Fuck no.”

“But how am I going to eat it?” I asked him.

“That’s your problem,” he replied, lovingly. So I went alone.

Vanni’s wife cautioned that I should cover my eyes when I ate the cheese, so that the maggots wouldn’t jump into them. Or cover my eyes, I thought, so no one sees me cry while I choke down this cheese. Vanni led me down two flights of stairs to his cantina—these Italian men know a thing or two of mancaves—and gestured toward a deep kitchen pot covered with a dish towel and a lid. He was proud of his contraband, smuggled in the back of his car on an 11-hour ferry ride from Cagliari to the mainland. The room was filled with the pungency of stinky cheese on steroids, like something that was already smelly but then got left in the trunk of a car on a really hot day.

And I was about to pop the trunk and dig in.

Vanni ceremoniously removed the pot lid, the dishtowel, and then, the top rind of the cheese, revealing the squirmy surface of the marzu. The maggots were smaller and less revolting than I expected, but they were everywhere, way too numerous to attempt to pick out of the cheese—just in case anyone would consider trying that. With the lid off and the lights turned on, they started to hop—seriously hop—over the surface of the cheese and onto the table. I watched, transfixed, as one of the tiny worms—which are maybe two millimeters long at the most—contorted onto its tail and launched itself like a spring. It landed on my jeans and jumped away in a nanosecond.

Vanni poured us some Cannonau wine, a Sardinian red that is strong AF and for which I was really, really thankful in that moment. I asked him where he got the cheese, and he pretended not to hear me. I asked again and he mumbled, “Oh a friend.”

He broke up some pieces of carasau, the paper-thin, crunchy Sardinian flatbread, and proceeded to spread the pungent marzu. He added another piece of flatbread on top—presumably to keep maggots from jumping into my eyes, which was suddenly seeming like a real liability—and my Spartacus moment was upon me.

I tasted the cheese. I washed it down with some wine. I tasted some more. I drank some more wine. I tried not to think of live maggots in my mouth or in my digestive tract. And here’s what I learned about casu marzu:

• It tastes pretty good. If you like strong cheese, like gorgonzola, Stilton or camembert, you will like the taste of casu marzu. If anything beyond medium-sharp cheddar is too cheesy for you, you will fucking hate marzu, maggots or not.
• You can’t feel the maggots in your mouth. But the maggots are very much alive when you start to eat them. As long as you can chew without thinking too hard about it, it’ll be fine.
• You need to wash it down with wine. Between the overwhelmingly strong flavor of the cheese and you know, the whole eating maggots thing, I took a sip after each bite. Cannonau is 15% ABV. Vanni and I killed a bottle.

Despite vowing to never seek out casu marzu again, I ended up eating it a second time this past summer, after the worms had mostly died off and the wheel of cheese was almost gone. Everything I’ve ever read about casu marzu claims that you shouldn’t eat it after the maggots have died, but Vanni assured us small group of brave souls that a few dead maggots never killed anybody. And since I had already successfully eaten rotten cheese full of live maggots, I was feeling pretty invincible.

The post I Ate Sardinia’s Live-Maggot-Infested Cheese appeared first on VICE.

Well, fast forward a few years and maybe KFC just discovered the limits of people not giving a fuck. Because a builder bought a piece of original recipe chicken from a northern NSW store and found it full of maggots, and he gave a fuck.

The guy, Martyn Bates, posted the video to Facebook with this caption: “If this doesn’t put you off KFC nothing will….this came with extra wiggly things. I’d just taken a bite and it tasted funny.”

According to the Gold Coast Bulletin, Martyn bought three pieces of chicken about 3PM, ate one, and then tucked the remaining two back in the box, which he kept in a flexible cooler in a car. It was when he went back to eat the other two pieces at about 9PM that he found the maggots.

“It was like when you bite on tinfoil, it had a really strange taste,” he told reporter Amanda Robbemond. “I was so disgusted I ended up gargling half a bottle of Listerine.”

Now, it’s worth pointing out that yes, there was a gap of six hours between Martyn buying and eating the chicken. That’s plenty of time for flies to do their thing, which is exactly what a KFC spokesperson told the Bulletin.

“We have spoken to the customer in detail about his complaint,” a spokesman said. “We have explained why it is unlikely this situation happened in our restaurant pre-purchase.”

They claim this was the reason that Martyn received nothing but a terse “sorry” and a $20 voucher to buy some more chicken.

And the basic reason KFC denies responsibility is that they fry their chicken in 200-degree oil under pressure for eight minutes, which maggots wouldn’t survive. Then it’s stored at over 40 degrees, which is too hot for flies to lay eggs.

But….

Google the words “KFC” and “maggots” and you’ll find a few news stories from around the globe, all accusing the chain of selling maggoty chicken. There’s this one from January, this one November 2017, and this one from October 2016.

So maybe this is just the fourth case of dumbass customers buying chicken and then eating it in a very non-refrigerated format several hours later. Or maybe KFC needs to give more of a fuck. Either way, gross.

The post KFC Comes With Free Maggots Now appeared first on VICE.

Bilgola local Colin Weir told the Daily Telegraph he was heading down for a swim when he spotted the maggots. “I’ve been going to this beach every year for 15 years and have never seen anything like this… There were millions of them,” he said. “It has been quite the talk of the beaches this morning.”

One unlucky woman went for a swim not realising the water was teaming with maggots, Weir told the paper, “only to later realise her swimming costume was full of maggots.”

The local council tried to empty the pool to fix the issue; however, it didn’t work—because the ocean water was still filled with maggots.

According to the council’s manager of environment and infrastructure, Ben Taylor, the infestation occurred because flies had laid eggs on seaweed, which had washed up on the beaches.

“Natural beach conditions along with warm weather have contributed to an infestation in the seaweed caused by flies laying larvae,” told the Daily Telegraph. “We encourage people not to swim in the areas affected and abide by any pool closures.”

The post Millions of Maggots Have Washed Up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches appeared first on VICE.

Corey Taylor has a hectic schedule. When he hangs up the Slipknot mask, he fronts his “other” band, Stone Sour (who just released their new, sixth album, Hydrograd) and writes books (his upcoming fourth book, America 51, is in the works). That’s before he knackered his back last year, resulting in spinal surgery. In the interim, he and his Slipknot bandmates put together a live film, Day of the Gusano, which is out next month.

When we speak, he’s on surprisingly bright and breezy form given all he’s been up to over the last few weeks. Joking about how he’s been forced to work on his one day off this month, he’s ready to open up on everything from sobriety to the sesh, jazz to pissing in the shower, death to Sandra Bullock and “racist pricks” masquerading as patriots.

VICE: You’re a busy man. When was the last time you said “no” to something?
Corey Taylor: Last week? I get asked to do a lot of shit – a lot of guest spots. If it feels like I’m doing something that I’ve already done before, I’m gonna pass. I’ve definitely been down to do some dance shit. Something that’s a little darker. I’d kill to work with Trent [Reznor, Nine Inch Nails]. I’m also dipping back into more of the laid back, contemplative stuff – I’d love to do something on a jazz vibe. If nobody hits me up, I might just start my own jazz quintet and go in and record a cool, dark fucking six-song EP.

Is there anyone, apart from your partner, who you’re comfortable being naked around?
No! Well, I can’t say that because I’ve been naked onstage quite a few times, so I guess it’s my partner and the whole fucking world. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of people that makes it OK. Maybe that’s the voyeur in me, the adventurist in me – maybe I secretly just want to be part of some German nudist colony. If it was one other person I’d try to cover up and show some modicum of concern for it.

Do you have an outfit that you think you look fittest in?
I’ve been told that I look really good in a suit – a proper suit, dressed to the nines. Not just, “Oh, I found this on the floor and it doesn’t smell too bad.” But I dunno. I have a hard time with self-image anyway, and sometimes tend to put more stock in people’s opinions than I should. When I’m in a suit, unless I’ve picked it out and it’s the right fit and everything, I always just feel like I’m wearing my uncle’s clothes, without fucking sounding weird. For me, the shit that I’m most comfortable in is a cool pair of jeans and a T-shirt that doesn’t make me look like a piece of shit.

Tone shift – would you like to experience death, if it could be guaranteed that you’d be brought back to life?
No, because I wouldn’t want to feel that comfortable with death. When the time did come, when I was ready, I wouldn’t want to be brought back from it. I love life so much that I just want to fight for it, every fucking second that I have. If there absolutely is another level to go to, I want to look back on this and know that I experienced everything there is to experience, and know that I did it the right way.

How do you think you will die?
When you become a family man, you tend to let go of the shit that may have taken some of the years off. I put different importance on different things now. I’ve really started to look after my own health, and pay attention to the needs of my kids, as opposed to what I need. I guess, for me, the way I’d like to go is with one of my kids holding my hand in old age. Slipping away, so they don’t have to watch it.

If you were cast out into space, how long do you think you’d last?
Oh, probably as long as the oxygen allowed me. I’d be desperately screaming my tits off, because I wouldn’t know what to do. Are we talking a Gravity sort of situation, or are we talking what’s-his-name from Mission to Mars, who’s slowly falling towards the surface of the planet?

Let’s say Gravity. You’re way out there.
I don’t know if my brain could handle it. I would hope that my brain would be able to settle down for a second and stop panicking. I’m still not convinced that Sandra Bullock made it back to the planet, man! That fucking whole movie is such a fucking head-fuck for me! It’s brilliant, but there’s no fucking way! Really? Really, really? Come on. But then, if anyone could do it, Sandra Bullock can.

Do you pee in the shower, yes or no?
Oh, fuck yeah. I’m a guy. I’ve watched women pee in the shower – it’s weird. They have to assume a different position. Or they just let it go, which is also weird. With guys, it’s the difference between a faucet and a tear in a plastic bag. That’s the difference between men and women peeing in the shower – you know where the faucet’s gonna go; you tear that plastic bag, you’ve got no fucking idea. What the fuck is happening?! It’s the chaos theory of women peeing in the shower that scares the shit out of me.

Too erratic?
You can’t chart it! And if I can’t chart it, I don’t trust it.

How many people do you think have been in love with you throughout the years?
Truly in love with me? Three, maybe. Sometimes the people who truly love you, you don’t even realise. It depends on what kind of love we’re talking about, to be honest – there’s so many kinds these days, and sometimes hate is another form of fucking love. You never know. Love takes dedication, and it takes a certain kind of person to keep up that dedication. It’s a slippery slope.

What’s the closest you’ve ever come to having a stalker?
Oh, I’ve had many. This is no bullshit – I’ve noticed that my singing and my lyrics bring out a certain type of schizophrenia that makes certain people stop taking their meds, and they hyper-focus on me. It gets really weird. I’ve had a handful over the years – luckily nothing too intense.

How do you handle that?
The only thing I can do is report it. I make sure that everything is done by the book, but I also try to get them the help that they need. That’s the key element – making sure that they get the help they need. The couple of stalkers that I’ve had that weren’t affected by that end of the mental illness spectrum were much more of a Catfish kinda thing; a social media thing. They were creating a bunch of different profiles that would attack me, but then defend me. It was really fucking weird. It’s actually still going on. It comes and goes, and I haven’t been able to find out who it is. It’s tough to deal with, and it makes me close ranks a little more, which is hard to do in this fucking day and age, when part of what I do is so tied to social media. You just gotta do what you do.

Do you think drugs can make people happy?
I guess it depends on the drug. Cocaine made me happy the first time, and then it just made me a gnarly, crazy person. But then again, I was 15 at the time, so who fucking knows. I can say that one of the happiest times I’ve ever had was taking mushrooms. Ugh! That was like pure bliss. I think if you’re not happy in general, drugs aren’t going to make you happy. The problem is not many people take drugs any more just to have a good time. They take it because they’re filling in some kind of empty space. They fill that space with all the bullshit, and that’s when you stop becoming a personality and you become more of a tragedy, really. It’s the classic case of human over-consumption. Human beings don’t know how to do anything – we over-do everything. It’s a shame, because there are some really good drugs out there, but because we don’t really understand what moderation is, we will never truly be able to enjoy them.

What’s the grossest injury you’ve ever had?
I guess it’d have to be my spinal injury that I had surgery for last year. That was a fucking wake up call that I was not expecting. Because I was young enough when it happened, when you fall off-stage and fall five feet and land on the top of your head, there’s gonna be some fucking damage. I was 24 at the time, like, ‘Fuck it, here we go!’ It didn’t even occur to me to go to the doctor. I was like, ‘Well, I can move my fingers and toes!’ Over the years, all the headbanging, all the jumping around, all the beating the shit out of myself, it just exacerbated the injury and got it to the point where, when I was 42, I had no strength on my right side, my balance was off, my bladder control was fucked up. It’s amazing all the things that are connected to your spine. To find out that, because of that injury, the bone had started growing into my spine, to the point where I now have a bruise that you can actually see on fucking x-rays. That is a fucking wake up call of biblical proportions. It’s only in the last six months that I’ve actually started to feel normal again.

Has that made you more aware of your limitations?
No, because it’s me and I’m such an asshole. It’s like, ‘Oh I feel great now, let’s fucking push it ’til I’m 80!’ I’ve started headbanging onstage again, which is great. But now my neck hurts after a show and I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck, what did I do?’ It just makes you almost hyper-critical of everything you do. But I can’t live my fucking life like that – that’s how you end up driving yourself into the grave, with worry and bullshit like that. For me, it’s just about being aware, going to the doctor.

Just to wrap up – how often do you lie in interviews?
Honestly, I’m the worst fucking liar on the planet. You can totally tell when I’m lying, and anybody who knows me knows that. I really try hard not to lie. Even on the most basic level, like the social lies where you’re like, “Oh yeah, I’d love to see you, please come on over!” I really have tried desperately to just be honest. It’s so much more freeing to just fucking be honest. I guess the only time I really lie is by omission. If I don’t bring it up I’m technically not lying, but that’s not really true, is it? That’s maybe something I need to work on, in myself.

Is that something you’re looking to get better at then?
I think we all have something that we need to work on in ourselves, no matter how old we are. It’s like chipping away the plaster over the marble to see what’s underneath. You don’t know until you do – you don’t really get an idea of what shape you’re in. I don’t feel like there’s ever such a thing as too late.

@ginandconnick

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This isn’t a picture of the Romanian hospital mentioned in this article, but praying is probably what you’d want to be doing if you were a patient there. Photo by David Amsler via Flickr

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Last week, a particularly gruesome video was leaked to Romanian media, showing several maggots in an open wound close to a patient’s ear. The man had suffered severe burns and was hospitalized in a burn unit in Bucharest, Romania.

The video was leaked by Camelia Roiu—an anesthesiologist at Spitalul de Arși, where the patient was admitted—who told newspaper Gazeta Sporturlor: “What’s the point in hiding what’s really going on? What’s worse—to let the public know about the horrible conditions we work in or to live with not having done anything to change them?” She also claims that there were flies flying around the intensive care unit, where she shot the video. The patient died one day after the video was released.

“The maggots were not the cause of the patient’s death, and, of course, we removed them from the wound,” the hospital’s spokesperson Dr. Adrian Stănculea told Romanian television station Antena 3. “The footage is real—I can’t deny that. The patient had four or five larvae in the burn wounds on the side of his face. The wound was covered with dead tissue, which can’t be washed easily—if you aren’t careful, you could end up with an ear in your hand. Those areas were washed very delicately.”

But Camelia Roiu claims there have been other cases of larvae infecting patients’ wounds in the same unit. She has encouraged her colleagues to speak out, but the response has been mixed. “Some of my colleagues think I should shut up, but others are professionals. I appreciate that,” said Roiu, according to hotnews.ro. “Those who don’t want to admit what’s going on should remember that, as doctors, it is our duty to care for people.”

In an interview with TV station Digi 24, the recently appointed Romanian health minister Vlad Voiculescu did not hesitate to accuse the hospital’s management of negligence: “This is unacceptable… surely someone could have taken some time out of their lunch break to put up a mosquito net,” he said. He also said he hopes the doctor who filmed the incident cleaned the wound after putting her camera down.

The Romanian medical world has suffered a bunch of scandals recently. Less than a month ago, the same burn unit came under scrutiny when a patient died after she accidentally received a transfusion of the wrong blood type. In May 2016, an investigation showed that disinfectants used in most major hospitals’ across Romania were being diluted to the point where they lost their effect. And in November 2015, 64 young people lost their lives in a fire in Bucharest’s Colectiv club. An investigation by newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor revealed that the cause of some of those deaths were not the actual burns, but hospital infections.

The Spitalul de Arși intensive care unit was closed down after the larvae video was leaked. The Ministry of Health sent out a press release describing the measures the hospital will take to prevent this from happening again—like installing hand-sanitizing stations at the entrance and exit of every ward, and hiring an outside firm to clean and disinfect the air conditioning. Phew.

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The post A Doctor Filmed Maggots Crawling Out of a Patient’s Wounds at a Romanian Hospital appeared first on VICE.

Max Scott, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University, developed the wound-cleaning maggot as a side project, and received no funding to do his proof-of-concept work. “We had the technology to engineer blowflies, and realized we could apply it to a closely related species, for cleaning wounds,” he told me.

Scott’s lab focuses on creating engineered strains of the Australian sheep blowfly and the New World screwworm, two livestock pests. For decades, these bugs have been controlled by blasting them with radiation to sterilize them, then releasing them into the wild to mate with others. But healthy bugs don’t really like to mate with sickly, irradiated ones. And anyway, Scott says his GM technique is a lot more efficient.

“We’re modifying [insect] strains so they carry genes that are lethal to female flies, but not male,” he said. The males still mate with female bugs, but produce no offspring—a similar method to what’s being done at Oxitec, with mosquitoes, to put a stop to the transmission of Zika and other mosquito-borne viruses.

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The green bottle fly larvae is already used in FDA-approved “maggot debridement therapy,” in which maggots are applied to non-healing wounds, like diabetic foot ulcers, which can lead to gangrene. It’s a time-honoured technique, and seems to work in a few different ways. Maggots munch away dead tissue, but also “change the pH of the wound,” Scott said, by secreting ammonia and making it more alkaline, and thus less friendly to invasive bacteria. “They also secrete antimicrobial peptides,” he said. The bugs can be effective against MRSA, for example, a particularly fearsome drug-resistant bug.

These GM maggots are even better, because they also pump out something called human platelet-derived growth factor-BB, which stimulates cell growth and survival.

Scott recognizes that maggots aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But some people don’t have other options, he said. There are suppliers of prescription-only medical maggots in the US, like Monarch Labs, which markets a few different “maggot dressings” (one with the jaunty name “Le Flap duJour“). Some companies sell them in “porous bags,” he said, which are placed over the wound, so that nobody has to deal directly with bugs.

And patients can be surprisingly receptive, said Scott, who hopes to do a study of his GM maggots in lab animals next, and eventually move to humans. “My old neighbour was a retired nurse. She said that patients were quite happy to try it, if it would save them from amputation,” he said. “It was a lot of the nurses that had a hard time.”

The post A Scientist Has a Solution to Antibiotic Resistance—Genetically Modified Maggots appeared first on VICE.