Around 100,000 people attend hospital casualty units each year with burns injuries. The culprits are often the dangers lurking in every kitchen - steaming kettles, bubbling hot oil or fat, and scalding cups of tea or coffee - and the victims tend to be toddlers, unsteady on their feet, hugely curious, and completely lacking a sense of danger.

But one of the most horrific burns cases in recent months was that of Alfred Page, a 12-year-old boy from Gillingham, Kent, who was injured not in the home but while out playing with home-made petrol bombs. He suffered 70% burns when another boy sparked a lighter near him, and will bear permanent scars.

The other boy, also 12, still faces a sentence after admitting, at a court case that ended last week, "recklessly" causing grievous bodily harm.

Alfred, however, has made a remarkable recovery since the incident in May. He no longer takes painkillers, can walk without a frame, and has started studying again. But his fightback is far from over and he faces further skin grafts.

Alfred was treated at the St Andrew's Centre at Broomfield hospital in Chelmsford, Essex, where surgeons have pioneered work on the restoration of burns victims' skin using an artificial replacement made from an extraordinary combination of silicon and derivatives of shark's skin and cowhide.

This "artificial skin", Integra, can achieve remarkable and rapid results for burns sufferers. But it is expensive enough to make NHS accountants go pale. A sheet of Integra about 10 inches by eight inches costs about £1,500. Typically, at least 10 will be needed to treat a burn, depending on the size of the injury and the victim's age.

The treatment works by using the body's own regenerative powers. The artificial skin - which looks like a semi-transparent clingfilm wrap and initially smells of the alcohol it is preserved in - is laid over the wound once all the dead tissue has been excised.

Normal healthy skin is made up of two layers: the epidermis, which is the waterproof protective layer on top, and the dermis, which contains more complex structures like the hair follicles, sweat glands and sebaceous glands that produce oils.

In a deep burn, both these layers are destroyed. Victims with extensive deep burns have no temperature controls because they cannot sweat.

In the immediate aftermath of the burn, they can sometimes even walk around feeling no pain because the nerve endings in their skin have been stripped away.

Integra is also made up of two layers: silicon on top, and a mix of bovine collagen and shark fin cartilage underneath.

Collagen is the basic building block of the human body, says Peter Dziewulski, consultant plastic surgeon at the St Andrew's Centre.

"If you think of the body as a house, collagen makes up the structure, the bricks as it were," he says.

In the case of Integra, it comes from special herds of cattle that are guaranteed BSE-free, combined with the shark derivative, chondroitin-6 sulphate, which acts "like the cement between the bricks that binds the collagen more tightly together".

Blood vessels grow into the collagen lattice to form a new dermis, and the burn victim's body uses the animal material to create new cells.

The body does not reject the shark and cow matter as it would do transplants of pig skin or another person's skin (both of which are alternatives) because it is not intact "foreign" cells but a kind of potpourri of reconstituted biological material.

It usually takes about three to four weeks for the blood vessels to reach the top of the collagen layer, after which the silicon is peeled off and a very thin skin graft is used to replace the epidermis.

"[Integra] allows us to take away the all the dead tissues very quickly after the injury. Dead tissues always attract bacteria," says Dziewulski.

It gets the wound closed, which protects against infection and reduces water losses, and reduces the metabolic overdrive experienced by a burn victim as the body battles to recover.

It also means that the patient does not have to go through the unpleasant experience of having grafts taken from other parts of his body (in some cases the burn is so extensive there is not much skin left on the patient to graft over the burns).

But what Integra does not recreate is all the complex structures, the hair follicles and glands that provide essential functions - such as helping insulate us, and keeping the skin oiled and waterproof - that we do not notice unless we lose them.

Here the surgeons at the St Andrew's centre have made an advance on existing treatment. Consultant plastic surgeon Jim Frame has found that implanting hair follicles into the Integra will stimulate the growth of new skin.

Working on the scalp of a badly burned patient last year, he found that cells from the hair follicles grew up the hair shaft and provided a new layer of epidermis over the wounded area.

In two weeks, a new epidermis had grown around the hairs, removing the need for a second operation to apply a skin graft. The patient, a man in his 20s from Essex, became the first person in the world to benefit from the new treatment. The ultimate aim of the surgeons' quest is to regenerate new skin as soon after the burn injury as possible.

And what does the future hold for Alfred Page, who was finally allowed home in September after four months in hospital and 20 operations? He declared at the weekend that he was looking forward to indulging once more in his favourite hobby - fishing.

"I went with Dad for three hours the first week I came home," he said. "It was great just breathing in some sea air."

• The Burned Children's Club runs an overseas exchange scheme and annual outdoor pursuits holiday for young burn victims treated at the St Andrew's Centre. Readers can make donations to the club, a registered charity, at 114 Middle Crockerford, Vange, Basildon, Essex, SS16 4JA.

Treating burns: then and now

Ted Rogers, 82

Treatment for burns may have been less hi-tech 50 years ago, but it proved effective for injured second world war soldier Ted Rogers, whose face and hands were ravaged in an explosion caused by a German bomb hitting a lorry carrying ammunition.

"I was an anti-tank gunner with the 7th armoured division against the Axis forces in the desert.

"I went with the eighth army under Montgomery from Alamein to fight at Mareth in Tunisia, where the Germans had a strong defensive line. In March 1943 I was in a slit trench and a Stuka dive bomber dropped a bomb that unfortunately hit the truck, which was carrying about 120 rounds of artillery ammunition and I don't know how many gallons of petrol.

"The blast went down into the trench and I was very seriously burned, mostly my hands and face. All I could see was fire.

"I was flown from Tripoli to Cairo, where they cleaned the wound up. The orderly picked bits off you that were coming away, like a bit of my ear.

"My eyelids were replaced with skin from my arms. The skin on my hands was replaced with grafts, which was done in England when I was transferred to a hospital in County Durham. I had dozens of operations.

"All the skin off the back of my hands had to be replaced. That was done with skin from my stomach, and in order to replace the skin on my stomach they took a fairly thick lump from my thigh. Little bits of skin were taken off my arm to make up what was lost from my thigh. I felt extremely ill; I almost weep at the thought of it now."

Painful though the operations were, he made a successful recovery. On his return to civilian life, Rogers resumed his peacetime occupation of bricklaying, and even went on to build a yacht, which he sailed across the Atlantic.

One remarkable side-effect of the burns is that he has found it acts like "a built-in facelift" as he has grown older. "People who have severe burns, your face is initially contracted, but as the years go by this acts as a facelift, instead of your face sagging it remains fairly firm in contour," he says.

Terry Everitt, 46

A works manager from Essex, Terry suffered extensive burns when he was very young. Over the years he has had as many as 60 operations, but he suffered continual problems until he was treated with Integra.

"I was about a year old and put something on top of the fireguard. It caught fire and set light to my woollen jumpsuit," he says.

"My mother came in and pulled it off, but because it was wool it had melted into my chest, and it pulled all the skin off my chest and the bottom half of my face.

"I've always lived with it. From the bottom of my lower lip to the top of my stomach I had scar tissue. Scar tissue doesn't grow, so I had to have numerous operations, taking skin grafts from different areas of my body.

"I always used to spend all my summer holidays in hospital having bits of skin taken off. When you get to be a teenager, blaming problems on the scars becomes an easy way out: 'There's no point in trying for the job because they're not going to give it to me.' If you get on the bus you find that people do not want to sit next to you.

"Because the skin used for transplants came off my thighs, I've had to go back every three or four years to have the fat taken off, or they [the transplant areas on his chest] end up looking like Cornish pasties.

"My natural growing stopped a long time ago, but I put on a bit of weight, as you tend to, and it started pulling my shoulders in. I could look straight ahead, but I couldn't look up.

"The advantage of the Integra is that it stretches; before I could only get my right arm up to about a 90 degree angle, now I can put it straight up in the air.

"And if I take my top off now, you have to look very close to notice that it is not normal skin."