HEALTH: Why this Brazilian city uses tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims.

The three functional skin banks in Brazil can meet only 1 percent of the national demand, said Dr. Edmar Maciel, a plastic surgeon and burn specialist leading the clinical trials with tilapia skin.

As a result, public health patients in Brazil are normally bandaged with gauze and silver sulfadiazine cream.

“It’s a burn cream because there’s silver in it, so it prevents the burns from being infected,” said Dr. Jeanne Lee, interim burn director at the the regional burn center at the University of California at San Diego. “But it doesn’t help in terms of debriding a burn or necessarily helping it heal.”

The gauze-and-cream dressing must be changed every day, a painful process. In the burn unit at Fortaleza’s José Frota Institute, patients contort as their wounds are unwrapped and washed.

Enter the humble tilapia, a fish that’s widely farmed in Brazil and whose skin, until now, was considered trash. Unlike the gauze bandages, the sterilized tilapia skin goes on and stays on.

Finally, a reason not to hate tilapia.