A new type of bandage will draw out bacteria and speed healing

Personally, I like the bacon bandages available from Archie McPhee. I will warn you, however - and this comes from someone who has bought a full box of those bandage tins - that their sterile wrapping isn't as well made as are the name-brand Band Aids. If you leave the bacon bandages for a few years, the wrapping comes apart.

I'm thinking, though, that any bandages made out of the material from this article will be of slightly higher quality than were those bacon bandages.

The basics - including the graphic above from the ACS-published article - are that...

[t]he nanofibre mesh is created using a technique called electrospinning, in which polymer filaments 100 times thinner than a human hair are squeezed out of an electrified nozzle.

The resulting fibre is then coated in compound called allylamine, which Abrigo has found makes a range of different bacteria quickly attach to it.

The bandages have been tested on liquid media and directly onto agar plates but not yet on actual wounds.

From the ACS abstract - and possibly most interesting from a material perspective, "[f]iber diameter was shown to affect the ability of bacteria to proliferate within the fibrous networks, depending on cell size and shape. The highest proliferation rates occurred when fiber diameter was close to the bacterial size. Nanofibers were found to induce conformational changes of rod shaped bacteria, limiting the colonization process and inducing cell death. The data suggest that simply tuning the morphological properties of electrospun fibers may be one strategy used to control biofilm formation within wound dressings."

How cool...