# Silver Makes Antibiotics Thousands of Times More Effective



## jeremiyah (Feb 13, 2009)

*I am sure that Scientific American holds no validity for skeptics and other even less enlightened folk, but, this is an interesting validation of the power of silver...*

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http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...nds-of-times-more-effective&posted=1#comments*
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Silver Makes Antibiotics Thousands of Times More Effective*

The antimicrobial treatment could help to solve modern bacterial resistance

By Brian Owens and Nature magazine

Stenotrophomonas maltophilia

Silver may help in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria such as Stenotrophomonas maltophilia by easing large antibiotic molecules through the microbes' outer coating. Image: Wikimedia Commons/Riraq25

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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 Medicine.

"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.

Resistance is futile
Many antibiotics are thought to kill their targets by producing reactive oxygen compounds, and Collins and his team showed that when boosted with a small amount of silver these drugs could kill between 10 and 1,000 times as many bacteria. The increased membrane permeability also allows more antibiotics to enter the bacterial cells, which may overwhelm the resistance mechanisms that rely on shuttling the drug back out.

That disruption to the cell membrane also increased the effectiveness of vancomycin, a large-molecule antibiotic, on Gram-negative bacteria - which have a protective outer coating. Gram-negative bacterial cells can often be impenetrable to antibiotics made of larger molecules.

"It's not so much a silver bullet; more a silver spoon to help the Gram-negative bacteria take their medicine," says Collins.

Toxic assets
Vance Fowler, an infectious-disease physician at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says the work is "really cool" but sounds a note of caution about the potential toxicity of silver. "It has had a checkered past," he says.

In the 1990s, for example, a heart valve made by St. Jude Medical, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, included parts covered with a silver coating called Silzone to fight infection. "It did a fine job of preventing infection," says Fowler. "The problem was that the silver was also toxic to heart tissue." As a result the valves often leaked.

Before adding silver to antibiotics, "we'll have to address the toxicity very carefully", says Fowler. Ingesting too much silver can also cause argyria, a condition in which the skin turns a blue-grey color - and the effect is permanent.

Collins says that he and his colleagues saw good results in mice using non-toxic amounts of silver. But, he adds, there are ways to reduce the risk even further. "We're also encouraging people to look at what features of silver caused the helpful effects, so they can look for non-toxic versions," he says.

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on June 19, 2013.


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## Turtle (Dec 10, 2009)

I actually read this article a few weeks ago. Very interesting stuff, and it makes a couple of great points; never underestimate the knowledge of the ancients! 

What it neglects to mention is that silver can also be toxic to humans in too large a dose.


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## Sentry18 (Aug 5, 2012)

Someone posted this awhile back. Very interesting stuff. As antibiotics lose their effectiveness we need to do something (along with NOT prescribing them for every little cold) to enhance them.


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## mojo4 (Feb 19, 2012)

So how do you make it? Just suck on a silver dime or what? Melt it down and shoot it like heroin?? Well maybe not that but how do you infuse silver with antibiotics??


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## ras1219como (Jan 15, 2013)

It sounds like you would probably have to ionize it in some way. It mentions dissolved ions in the article. Above and beyond joe blows technology


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## drfacefixer (Mar 8, 2013)

Silver is an interesting drug. It works well on gram negative coverage which is what antibiotics are always trying to selectively improve the spectrum to include. As mentioned, when taking internally, there are other dose dependent toxic effects to tissues. It is an avid promoter of radicals and there are few elements that react with more things than silver. Arsenic is minute quantities works great treat specific infections. The magic that they've made in this therapy has to do with the coating, the release, and getting the silver to the infection. I've seen colloidal silver in topical dressings and bandages do miracles. Its expensive as heck as you can imagine. Its usually reserved for burns, cosmetic scars, and wound breakdown cases. In a hospital, its regulated to usually the wound care nursing staff and plastic surgery clinics because of its increased cost.


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## Meerkat (May 31, 2011)

Who can you trust who you buy it from? So many scams now. Our food,medicine has all been tampered with.


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