Leeches: Not Just for Bloodsucking Anymore

RODNIKI, Central Russia -- At the International Center for Medicinal Leeches, Gennady Nikonov has a true evangelical fire about blood sucking and is determined to restore to the leech its good medieval name.


Nikonov, the center's director, has big plans for his eye cream made of extract of leech, which he is sure will do well in the United States when it goes on sale there soon.


And he sees a great future for leeches - and some big money along the way - as he sends the creatures to pharmacies and doctors all over Russia, to be placed on the tailbone of someone who suffers from migraines, for example, or on the legs of people hobbled by phlebitis.


Nikonov acknowledges it is a hard sell. "It's a perfectly normal reaction for a person to think 'Leech. Yuck,''' said Nikonov, a pharmacological biologist.


But he insisted he was on the verge of tapping into a worldwide trend.


"There's a general feeling around the world to get away from the synthetics of medicine and back to nature,'' he said. "And we have yet to uncover the many mysteries the leech holds.''


Meanwhile, Nikonov has to settle for a rather limited audience for the virtues of the 1.5 million leeches bred annually in the warm confines of the center.


There are the village locals and the cognoscenti from Moscow, 16 kilometers away, who come to buy jelly jars filled with leeches in a room decorated with pictures of the squirmy creatures latched on to human skin.


And there are the men from a nearby slaughterhouse who came on a recent Friday afternoon to prepare for the Monday feeding.


They took six aluminum milk cans to a room filled with high metal shelves stacked with big jars of murky water. Women in aprons and white head scarves emerged from between the shelves and opened the steaming cans. One got a dowel and mixed the cows' blood in the cans, for the surface had congealed into a spongy foam, and accidentally sloshed some onto the floor in bright starbursts.


"We feed our leeches cows' blood because cows are cleaner than pigs,'' a biologist, Yelena Titova, explained to a group of visiting doctors as thousands of leeches swam about them in the jars. "Pigs eat all sorts of things, just like we do. That's why leeches usually don't live long after feeding on a person, because there is so much junk in our blood.''


But if Nikonov has his way, the leeches bred here are doomed to find their way to human beings.


The center, built in 1937, was in a shambles when Nikonov arrived 14 years ago eager to test ideas that had emerged in his laboratory work with leeches. Most other leech farms built under the Soviets have gone out of business.


Of the 400 or so kinds of leeches, only one, hirudo medicinalis, can be used for therapeutic purposes. Cherished by the pharaohs, leeches were used for lowering blood pressure - not to mention removing the evil eye.


But Nikonov and his biologists contend that the saliva of leeches has 60 kinds of proteins with medical uses, like improving the immune system and reducing inflammation.


Russian medical schools do not teach about leeches, but patients and doctors are trickling back to them. Some are skeptical that modern medicine has all the answers. For others, drugs are too expensive to use regularly.


Medicinal leeches bred commercially cost only 30 cents each, and for most treatments only two or three leeches a week are needed. (In the United States, where leeches are sometimes used to aid blood flow after reconstructive surgery, the companies that market them say one costs $6 to $9.)


The dozen doctors at the center one morning scribbled copious notes from Titova's account of leeches - a sort of everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about- bloodsucking-worms-but-were-afraid-to-a sk tour.


Leeches, for example, have five senses, as humans do, and are hermaphrodites, though they mate to reproduce. Because leeches are so sensitive, only women handle them at the plant. "Leeches need care and affection, and only women, mothers, can give that,'' Titova explained. "Men either do all the grunt work or they run things.''


Adult leeches feed on average about once every three months, and hungry leeches should never be stored with fed leeches, or the consequences for the latter could be grave.


A leech has three jaws that come together into something like the Mercedes-Benz logo. Each jaw has 90 teeth, and they work like tiny saws to open the skin so that the leech can issue an anti-coagulating secretion and draw blood. Leeches usually feed for about 30 to 40 minutes, and the average leech consumes about 3 to 5 milliliters of blood. But patients continue to bleed that much after the sated leech falls off.


Some of the physicians who have visited the leech farm had already used leeches to treat patients - and themselves. "I put a couple behind my ears for hypertension,'' said one rosy-cheeked woman.


"They're great. They dangle just like earrings.''


Doctors generally destroy leeches after a single application, and most of the center's revenue comes from their sale. But the plant also has agreements with companies in Ukraine and France to make face creams from leeches. Nikonov would not discuss revenue, but he said 150 units of their flagship cream, Antonia, were sold when first introduced in 1995; last year, 500,000 jars of the cream were snapped up.


The companies also plan to introduce toothpastes with leech extracts. Their cosmetics are already sold in Europe, and the center said it recently signed a contract with a small Dallas importer called Odysseus Russian to sell up to 2 million units of the various creams in the United States starting in May.


The company does draw a line when it comes to some uses of leeches.


Several years ago, a few people who regularly bought leeches at the plant were putting them on the menu of the Peking restaurant in downtown Moscow.


"They didn't tell us why they were buying them, but from acquaintances we found out that the leeches were being cooked up as a kind of blood sausage,'' Nikonov said. "Once we heard, we stopped selling to these people. I felt bad for the leeches. They were created for more noble purposes, after all, than to be scarfed up at a restaurant.''