Silver has been used to fight infection for thousands of years. Preparations of silver were used throughout the middle ages as an natural broad-spectrum antibiotic. In fact, while most antibiotic drugs are effective against a select few types of bacteria, colloidal silver has been shown to kill over 650 different types of disease causing bacteria and many viruses as well! Silver is also non-toxic and does not product resistant strains of bacteria. Read more about how this ancient treatment could help to deal with the thoroughly modern scourge of antibiotic resistance!
The discovery of antibiotics was considered the most important breakthrough in medicine this century. Beginning with the introduction of penicillin in the early 1940's and the dramatic evidence of infection control in hospitals and during the Second World War, one disease after another fell to the constant onslaught of new and more powerful antibiotics. It was believed in those days that mankind could conquer for all time, many of the infectious diseases, which had plagued us for centuries.
A team led by James Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University in Massachusetts, has published a study on how silver can fight bacteria effectively by silver 'disrupting multiple bacterial cellular processes'.
After the War, research on these drugs quickly showed up the problem of "drug resistance" and as a result, for the first few years antibiotics were prescribed with caution.
Bacteria it turned out were difficult to conquer. They are the oldest life form on the Earth and they have survived, and thrive, virtually everywhere precisely because they are adaptive, that is to say they are capable of changing themselves in response to a hostile environment. When bacteria are constantly exposed to antibiotics, they will do what they do best; they adapt. If only a single bacterium manages to survive an antibiotic attack, that organism can produce over 16,000,000 offspring within 24 hours and most of these will inherit the ability to resist that particular drug.
By the 1970's antibiotics were routinely prescribed by most General Practitioners, for viral infections ("just in case they develop into a bacterial infection"), they were included in stock feed programs not only for disease control but because they improved weight gain and they were being pumped into hospitals at alarming rates. It was during the same era that the first MDR (Multi Drug Resistant), strains of bacteria started to appear in Hospitals. The most commonly known of these is 'Golden Staph' which was the first of the new man made "super bugs".
The body cannot utilise metallic silver and it must be converted to the colloidal state in order to be absorbed. A colloid is a suspension of minute particles of the metal (each particle consisting of about 15 atoms) in water. In this state, silver can be easily absorbed and utilised by the body to fight bacterial and viral infections. Indeed, some scientists believe that silver is necessary for the proper functioning of the normal immune system. Colloidal Silver was used and proven to be effective against hundreds of disease-causing bacterium and viruses by the 1940s. Its action as a broad spectrum antibiotic has never been matched by the modern pharmaceuticals in that it produces no drug resistance whatsoever.
References:
Silver Enhances Antibiotic Activity Against Gram-Negative Bacteria
Jose Ruben Morones-Ramirez1,2,*,†, Jonathan A. Winkler1,3,*, Catherine S. Spina2,4 and James J. Collins1,2,3,4,
Spectrum of antimicrobial activity associated with ionic colloidal silver. Morrill K1 2013 Mar;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23017226
