Natalya Lepyoshkina smiled as she fed her three-week-old “children” a meal of warm cow’s blood, rinsed them off with water and poured them into an array of glass jars.
“They’re happy, they’re full,” she said as the young leeches, squirming and swollen from their meal, settled into the containers that would be their home until the next feeding.
Lepyoshkina’s charges were among the three million leeches raised every year at the International Medical Leech Center, an institution founded in 1937 that touts itself as the world’s largest leech-growing facility.
Located in Udelnaya, a village of humble wooden houses several kilometers southeast of Moscow, the center is now enjoying strong sales as scientists reassess their attitude to the bloodsucking creatures.
Researchers, Western governments and even Hollywood stars have endorsed the use of leeches in recent years, after decades during which the practice fell into disuse and was regarded as a relic of medieval times.
The American Journal of Nursing wrote this year that leech therapy was having a “resurgence,” mainly in helping patients of plastic and reconstructive surgery, and was useful for certain blood and tissue conditions.
The US government approved the use of leeches as medical “devices” in 2004, and the actress Demi Moore revealed last year that she had undergone leech therapy in Austria to “detoxify” her blood.
“Now this is a scientifically proven form of healing,” Gennady Nikonov, the director of the Udelnaya leech center, said in his office, near a wall covered with awards from European and Russian institutes.
Nikonov hopes researchers will find new uses for the leech — and bring more business to his center, which besides dominating the Russian market, sells tens of thousands of leeches annually to a French company that distributes them in the West.
“The leech is revealing more and more of its secrets to us,” Nikonov said.
A walk through the leech center reveals room after room of towering metal shelves, each of which is packed with glass jars holding leeches in various stages of development floating in water.
Some doors are marked with signs reading “Mating Room,” where leeches are given extra space and held in heat and light conditions ideally suited for leech romance.
A small army of women dressed in blue smocks and white aprons oversees the life cycle of each leech, from tearing open cocoons full of slithering babies to preparing adults for medical use.
The existence of such a facility is a legacy of the Soviet Union, where pharmacies remained stocked with leeches even as Western medicine stopped using them amid the 20th-century antibiotics revolution.
Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and its centrally planned economy, the leech center experienced hard times as production plunged and employees became disillusioned.
“There was no money to pay the salaries. The building was falling apart,” Nikonov recalled.
Since then, however, Russia’s economic revival and the growing popularity of leech therapy have helped reinvigorate the center, with production rising tenfold from the early 1990s low.
In 2007, to mark its 70th anniversary, the center even set up a monument in its courtyard featuring a bronze leech crawling up a marble column.
Proud employees say it is the world’s only monument to hirudo medicinalis, the species of leech used for medical purposes.
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