Fish Skin Compared to Cadaver Skin as Temporary Cover for Full Thickness Burns

Objectives and rationale: Optimal burn management involves removing all the dead or burned tissue as early as feasible and cover with an autograft called split thickness skin graft (STSG) taken from the patient. This procedure creates a new wound on the patient and sometimes, when the burn covers very large portion of the patient body, there is a lack of healthy skin to use for this purpose. Under those circumstances, donated cadaver skin is used as a temporary coverage until the patient´s own donor site wound has healed enough to be used again. The proposed clinical study aims to determine if treatment with fish skin is an alternative to cadaver skin as a temporary coverage for debrided full-thickness burns prior to STSG in terms of autograft take, time to heal, quality of healing (scarring), pain and adverse effects.