Hirudo Medicinalis and Hirudo Verbana leeches will arrive in a special hydro gel that keeps them during transport. Once you have the medical leeches, transfer them with your forceps into a wide-neck jar jar and fill it half-way with water. Use river water, rain or tap water. With a piece of cloth cover the neck of the jar and hold it tight with a ribbon or rubber band. The cloth seals the jar's throat very well so that your Hirudo leeches would not escape. Everyone knows that medical leeches are kept in specialized farms. Wild leeches can hardly be found in nature. Leeches that people can buy for domestic usage are ready for application and they are not suitable for further propagation or reproduction. Furthermore, leeches used for the therapy are quite young. In order to breed them at home, a person would spend a lot of time and feed them with certified blood, which causes a lot of difficulties. On this occasion we will not talk about their cultivation, but we will focus on taking care of medicinal leeches before and after application.
After purchasing medicinal leeches, you will get an order package delivery with a water container or with wet gel crystals. A water container should be prepared for leeches one day prior.
Water: the most suitable water for leeches is settled tap water. Fill a contained with tap water and leave it for 24 hours. People think that one should get water from a well or a river, however, this is not at all necessary.
Container: a perfect container is a plastic container with a wide neck and a lid, which is big enough to place your hand, and yet it could be tightly closed. A wide opening is important for easy handling, be it for pulling the leeches or cleansing the vessel. Plastic should be transparent, so that it would allow you to observe the leeches contained.
One can store approximately 50 leeches in a 3-liter container. However, 100 leeches are too many for that size container.
After bringing the leeches, you should take care of them appropriately. Pour water first into the vessel and after that let your leeches in. Leeches do not need too much oxygen to live, so closing your container tightly with a lid to ensure the leeches stay inside is all you need. All further care involves changing water every 2-3 days or weekly, watching the leeches, observing their health condition, vitality and sometimes cleaning out the leech container.
After placing your leeches into a container with settled water, what should be the further subsequent manipulations with them? Hungry leeches intended for use should not be exposed to high temperature or direct sunlight. It is better to leave them in the daylight, but away from the sun. If you are not going to use them right away, some people leave them in the refrigerator. There, they remain in a state similar to hibernation and some people prefer to preserve them this way. Used leeches can no longer be put in the same container with the unused leeches. You should prepare a new container one for those. Water conditions remain the same, the only difference is that you should no longer put them into the refrigerator, and it’s better to pick a dark place, certainly not too warm, for example, a cellar. A hungry leech is drawn to light looking for food. A satiated leech looks for a dark place due to the fact that it needs to absorb blood collected. In case of repeated use of a leech, for example, in the treatment course that lasts for 2-3 months, it is necessary to divide leeches into different containers. Leeches used during the first month should go to the first container, those used during the second month should go to the second one, and the third-month-leeches should be put into the third container. This system helps to have a general overview.
Another important factor is health condition of the leech. One should watch the leeches on a daily basis. They must be left in a transparent vessel. Transparency provides us with an eye contact possibility. We can see if they are healthy, ill or dead. Both new and used leeches must be checked. Even when leeches are placed in a dark place with water change every 2-3 days, their condition must also be checked. In general, you should not be concerned too much if a leech dies. A dead leech should be removed from a vessel and the water in the container must be changed. If a leech that behaves strangely or looks sick is found, it is better to remove it from the container and put into a separate vessel. This applies to both used and new leeches. Each leech you suspect to be unhealthy should be kept in a special place, in a container, even if it is a small bottle. The leech should be left in this container until it is fully recovered or dead due to illness. There is a chance this leech recovers in a couple of days. In general, the thing is the sick leech should be removed from others not to transmit infection or affect negatively other healthy leeches.
It happens very often that one may notice some ring or a removed rim on a leech. The leech often removes its skin like a snake, and this old skin produces a secret coating on a body surface that looks like a ring around it. Leeches eventually get rid of it by removing the old skin, or the ring will burst, but one can remove it, so it’s not a problem.
Now let’s talk about cleaning out your container. Cleaning the container is actually not an easy thing if a person is not instructed for this. We need a large strainer / sieve, ideally if metal, and preferably the one with small holes using which the water from the container with leeches is poured out. The sieve is used to catch those leeches, as sometimes it happens that some of them are lost when pouring. After this, one should put the leeches back to the container. If you do not want to touch leeches, use surgical gloves and a pair of forceps for this manipulation. After water removing and returning the leeches left on the sieve back to the container, cleanse the container with tap water and be sure to drain the water from this container again using the sieve. Leeches found in the sieve must be placed back into the container again. If necessary, this process can be repeated several times, but usually twice are enough. When all the leeches are back in the container, one should fill the container with settled water, hermetically close it and put it in its place. Leech excrements, skins and secretion may be left on the sieve. That is why it is good to cleanse the sieve with boiling water to sterilize it. It should preferably be done before and after each use. Be sure to leave the sieve to chill to avoid damaging the leeches. We’ll also need a brush to clean the sieve. Do not use a brush for room cleaning or an object with chemicals. It’s actually really important that the brush does not contain residual traces of chemicals, soaps or detergents. That is, you should have a separate strainer and a separate brush specifically for this. The sieve must be cleaned with a brush and tap water, to be finally sterilized with boiling water.
When you take care of medicinal leeches at home, it is important to look after the container and water. However, visual observation of the leech health condition is also important when you change water in the vessel.
What do you do when you do not want to use medicinal leeches any more? What should you do next? When you remove the applied leech from a patient’s skin, what is the next step? One should decide for oneself whether he or she wants to put an end to the lives of leeches, or he/she wants to return them back to nature. If one wants to end their life, one can simply immerse them into alcohol solution at home which results in a quick death for leeches, and then it will be enough to flush them down the toilet or throw somewhere outside, where they will decompose. If we choose the second option to preserve and keep their lives in nature, we need to find them a stream, where people do not bathe, and pour the water with leeches out of the container there.
