Silver Makes Antibiotics Thousands of Times More Effective – could help to solve modern bacterial resistance
Jun 20, 2013
By Brian Owens and Nature magazine
[url]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silver-makes-antibiotics-thousands-of-times-more-effective/[/url]
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.
Comments
RCWhitmyer June 20, 2013, 12:33 PM
SILVADENE Cream 1% (silver sulfadiazine) has been used for decades for burns and other wounds so that route is all ready in use and tested. Testing for safety and effectiveness of any other routes would need to be done before your questions could be answered.
dguillaume June 20, 2013, 2:15 PM
Colloidal silver is a “don’t leave home without it” necessity in my house. Interesting to know that pioneers put silver coins in stored milk so it would not curdle! BTW, one would have to drink the stuff by the gallon to turn gray. It’s far, far safer than taking horrid antibiotics…and it works!
jafrates RCWhitmyer June 20, 2013, 3:25 PM
Silver sulfdiazine has been used for burns, but recent studies have suggested that there is either no difference or that it actually slows healing. There are some situations where it has been tested and shown preliminary benefits, but the burn coverings don’t seem to be among them.
teechamp June 21, 2013, 12:20 AM
Biofilm has been the bane of anyone suffering from PANDAS, the autoimmune disorder resulting from a strep infection or other bacterial or viral attack to the brain. I have been looking for clinically proven treatments to attack biofilm. Thank you for this research.
Page J June 21, 2013, 10:25 AM
These findings are timely given the increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistance. A recent review by Franco in Cell Mol Life Sci. summarizes the antimicrobial properties of snake venom, another substance that has the potential for drug development.
Atomswork June 21, 2013, 1:17 PM
OK this should destroy the colloidal silver bashers attack on colloidal silver. For years they asked “Wheres the proof?” A proven scientific study that silver works, and confirms that the ancients civilizaton knew something that our Doctors should know, well maybe they do know but are conveniantly enjoying the “perks” that mega pharmacueticle companies provide.
justified June 21, 2013, 1:34 PM
We people with common sense knew that silver worked all along!
Happy Hal June 22, 2013, 12:33 AM
The silver thread in my pressure stocking, really helped cure a skin infection.
FloxieHope June 26, 2013, 4:17 PM
Interesting! I will definitely try colloidal silver before I take another antibiotic – no doubt about that! And using it to help patients with MRSA is, without a doubt, a good thing. But please don’t assume that making an antibiotic stronger is always, or even usually, a good thing. In fact, in most cases it’s a pretty bad thing. Our microbiome is full of good bacteria that are already indiscriminately killed by broad spectrum antibiotics, leading to problems like c-difficile, leaky gut syndrome, etc. Many of our neurochemicals are also produced in our gut by our good bacteria, so killing them indiscriminately can lead to, well, bad things. Also, there is a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones (Cipro, Levaquin and Avelox) that already have devastating adverse effects including destruction of connective tissue throughout the body and central nervous system damage. Adding silver to the mix will make these dangerous drugs even more deadly than they already are. Information on fluoroquinolones and their devastating effects can be found on my blog – www.floxiehope.com.
dguillaume June 29, 2013, 2:05 PM
As I wrote in an earlier comment, my personal experience with colloidal silver versus being prescribed a “last ditch” antibiotic when I suffered with C-Diff provided as much “scientific proof” as I need. Doctors didn’t know how to heal me: as soon as I completed a course of antibiotics, C-Diff returned. I would be dead if I waited for the theory of a so-called “study”.
lifesilver July 1, 2013, 10:51 AM
The old “blue man” scare story persists. Pure elemental silver is inert and non-toxic. This is noted in the Merck PDR. It is the only heavy metal classified as such. That being said, there are valid concerns when using conventional ionic silver colloids internally. Their positive particle charge makes them eager to bond with other elements creating toxic silver salts.
A process for a nutritional supplement silver preparation was patented many years ago. It now holds three US Patents. It is made using eight, 10,000v AC electrodes at extremely low amperage. The result was a particle size averaging 5 – 10 nm of pure elemental silver with an oxide shell (Ag4O4).
Rustum Roy, the head of Pennsylvania State University Materials Science Department was captivated with the silver’s near solution relationship with the water medium. He led a team of eight materials scientists on a 4 year peer reviewed and published study of this technology. It can be read here: http://lifesilver.com/v1/Rustum_Roy_et_al_study.pdf
This article’s discovery of silver’s ability to once again make ineffective antibiotics active against resistant bacteria is not new. Using the above mentioned products, Viridis BioPharma, Mumbai, India, performed a similar study with 19 of the most widely used antibiotics against 9 of the most problematic resistant pathogenic bacteria. This study was also peer reviewed and finally published in 2006. It can be read here: http://lifesilver.com/v1/SWD.pdf
Numerous independent safety studies have been performed on these nano-catalytic silver hydrosols: http://lifesilver.com/v1/safety.htm
Last month the first ever human double blind safety study was performed at Utah University. I am told that the results were impressive. The orally administered silver was found to have completely passed through and evecuated the bodies of the study participants within 24 hours. This study is currently in peer review.
While the warnings in this article are certainly valid for a wide range of silver preparations, they are not applicable to the latest medical silver technology.
WinDoc63 dsalvam July 12, 2013, 9:24 PM
The novel idea of combining silver with antibiotics to increase sensitivity opens many possible options to those with resistant infections, since no really new antibiotics are being developed, and resistance is inevitable.
Since silver stain is used for Lyme microscopy because it stops motility of the spirochetes, allowing one to observe the spiral structure, I suspect it will be effective in resistant Lyme disease as well as against gram negative and gram positive bacteria.
Alan Gorton dsalvam October 17, 2013, 3:57 PM
People who use colloidal silver have known for years that its a better antibiotic than big pharmas antibiotics.
viviansuthers February 28, 2014, 4:45 AM
I guess the information is quite true, but of course we can’t make everyone believe it. On the other hand, an article recently posted that many farmers have made it common practice to give animals antibiotics to ensure they are healthy, even if the animal would not normally be healthy. The FDA, however, will be limiting some of this practice in an effort to keep human antibiotic resistance from growing.
fairydreams karenalcott May 7, 2014, 2:47 PM
Actually it isn’t a slurry of dried silver. Good colloidal silver is the process of introducing a low level electrical current through two fine silver pieces, in a suspension of (best) reverse osmosis water with a UV filter. Base metal, found in sterling or lesser silver mixes, would likely create a less reliable product. Colloidal silver, as it is called had a long history of safe use. I first started using it ten years ago, because I am allergic to penicillin. My family produces their own colloidal silver, and everyone in our family, uses it, as need (circumstances vary, doses vary per differing needs.)
There is a lot of good information out there, despite the repression of honest evaluations from the established media. As to Argyria. No legitimate case has EVER been linked to the use of correctly produced colloidal silver, and the number of cases linked to incorrect use/ manufactured products is less than a dozen cases in fifty plus years. It’s a scare tactic folks.
Use it or don’t use it, but it has, and remains an amazing resource for healing a wide (WIDE) variety of bacteria based ailments. Why is it “maligned/repressed/misrepresented”… because there’s no money in nearly free healing agents. And medicine in this country hasn’t been about healing for about eighty plus years. “Copeland’s Cure” gives a very insightful view on what happened to healing in this country much less homeopathic alternatives.
fairydreams dguillaume May 7, 2014, 2:51 PM
Yep. And setting aside the number of inaccurate or intentionally misrepresented linking of Colloidal Silver to Argyria, look up the stats on people who have died because of reactions to antibiotics, in the US alone 770 – 1500 people every year, depending on whose figures you believe.