Ozone Therapy to Treat Buruli Ulcer - Case Study

Background: an aggressive skin ulcer with limited treatment options

Buruli ulcer is a chronic, destructive skin and soft-tissue infection caused by Mycobacterium ulcerans. It is one of the world's neglected tropical diseases and is most common in parts of West and Central Africa, where it can leave large, slow-healing ulcers and lasting disability. Standard management combines prolonged courses of antibiotics with wound care and, in more advanced cases, surgery to remove affected tissue. These options are effective for many patients but can be difficult to deliver in low-resource settings, where cost, access to surgery and long treatment times are real barriers. Against that background, clinicians have looked at simpler adjuncts to wound care, and this report documents one such attempt using topical ozone.

Study design: a single reported case

This is a single case report - a detailed account of one patient rather than a controlled study. It describes a young female patient with a Buruli ulcer on the arm. Over a period of about two weeks, the wound was treated with topical ozone therapy applied to the ulcer, alongside wound care. The authors documented the appearance and progress of the ulcer during and after this treatment. A case report of this kind records what was observed in one individual; it does not compare treatments, use a control group, or randomise patients.

Findings: the reported ulcer improved over two weeks

The authors reported that the ulcer improved markedly over the roughly two-week course of topical ozone therapy, describing the outcome as excellent in a wound that had been difficult to manage. They noted that the approach was simple and inexpensive to deliver. Because this is a single patient treated without a comparison group, these observations describe what happened in this one case and cannot show that ozone therapy caused the improvement or that it would work reliably in others. A single case cannot establish that a treatment is effective.

What the authors concluded

The authors presented this as the first report of ozone therapy used for Buruli ulcer and suggested that, if the results were confirmed in properly controlled trials, topical ozone might become a useful, low-cost option for managing the disease in settings where antibiotics and surgery are hard to access. They were explicit that this was a preliminary observation and that randomised studies would be needed before any conclusions could be drawn about its role in treatment.

Limitations of this study

The central limitation is that this is a single case report. With only one patient, no control group and no randomisation, it cannot demonstrate that ozone therapy was responsible for the healing seen, nor how it might compare with standard antibiotic or surgical treatment. Wounds can also improve for many reasons, including concurrent wound care, so the specific contribution of ozone cannot be isolated here. Details of the treatment protocol are limited, and the findings have not been reproduced in larger controlled studies. This report should therefore be read as an early, hypothesis-generating observation about ozone as a complementary element of wound care, not as evidence that it treats Buruli ulcer. Anyone with a serious or non-healing wound, or a suspected infection, should be assessed and managed by a qualified healthcare professional.