Chris Bede / CC
More than a million people suffer burns annually and half go to an ER or are treated at a burn care center. LSU Health New Orleans professor of surgery Dr. Jeffrey Carter has been working on a more advanced way to assist burn victims with a type of spray-on-skin that significantly increases their survival rates.
“I work with a scientist that invented this over in Australia and helped develop it for the United States and it’s a technique where we take a small piece of skin, size of a business card and we are able to spray it on the wounds and accelerate healing,” said Dr. Carter.
Carter says when you can speed up recovery and repair wounds more efficiently, you reduce the chances of infection.
“By borrowing a small piece of skin, using the stem cells from it, we are able to take something that’s like a very small area and help those wounds heal and what would be normally weeks or months into something that’s maybe days or a few weeks,” said Carter.
In addition to speeding the burn recovery process, Carter says the spray-on-skin has another added benefit.
“A lot of times after a burn injury, people might lose their color to that part of their body and so this has been a wonderful treatment to help restore not only how the skin works but also what it looks like,” said Carter.
Carter is working with the state health department on delivering burn kits to first responders, so people with minor burns, including fire fighters, can get immediate treatment.
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