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Hee Hee Hee...............No you cannot eat silver This is true, but what can SILVER DO???

Like werewolves and vampires, bacteria have a weakness: silver. The precious metal has been used to fight infection for thousands of years — Hippocrates first described its antimicrobial properties in 400 bc — but how it works has been a mystery. Now, a team led by James Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University in Massachusetts, has described how silver can disrupt bacteria, and shown that the ancient treatment could help to deal with the thoroughly modern scourge of antibiotic resistance. The work is published today in Science Translational Medicine1.

“Resistance is growing, while the number of new antibiotics in development is dropping,” says Collins. “We wanted to find a way to make what we have work better.”

Collins and his team found that silver — in the form of dissolved ions — attacks bacterial cells in two main ways: it makes the cell membrane more permeable, and it interferes with the cell’s metabolism, leading to the overproduction of reactive, and often toxic, oxygen compounds. Both mechanisms could potentially be harnessed to make today’s antibiotics more effective against resistant bacteria, Collins says.

Introduction

The antimicrobial properties of silver have been known to cultures all around the world for many centuries. The Phonecians stored water and other liquids in silver coated bottles to discourage contamination by microbes (Wikipedia: Silver). Silver dollars used to be put into milk bottles to keep milk fresh, and water tanks of ships and airplanes that are “silvered” are able to render water potable for months (Saltlakemetals.com). In 1884 it became a common practice to administer drops of aqueous silver nitrate to newborn’s eyes to prevent the transmission of Neisseria gonorrhoeae from infected mothers to children during childbirth (Silvestry-Rodriguez et al., 2007).

In 1893, the antibacterial effectiveness of various metals were noted and this property was named the oligodynamic effect. It was later found that out of all the metals with antimicrobial properties, silver has the most effective antibacterial action and the least toxicity to animal cells (Guggenbichler et al., 1999). Silver became commonly used in medical treatments, such as those of wounded soldiers in World War I, to deter microbial growth (Saltlakemetals.com).

Once antibiotics were discovered, the use of silver as a bactericidal agent decreased. However, with the discovery of antibiotics came the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains such as CA-MRSA and HA-MRSA, the flesh-eating bacteria. Due to increasing antibiotic resistance, there has recently been a renewed interest in using silver as an antibacterial agent. The availability of new laboratory technologies such as radioactive isotopes and electron microscopy has greatly enabled us to investigate the antibacterial mechanism of silver in recent years