Re: silver as antimicrobe Re: distinguishing plate silver from solid silver

From: Marshall Dudley (mdudley_at_king-cart.com)
Date: 01/30/05 

Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 16:19:05 -0500

Archimedes Plutonium wrote:

> I did some searching on the Internet to see if anyone outlines how silver can be an
> antimicrobial. As I suspected, I found none because of a huge amount of chatter of
> "medical application". The interface of making money versus the posts of "pure
> science". Ads versus science and too bad that ads outnumber the basic science.
>
> If I had an educated guess for the mechanism would be what Marshall wrote about silver
> corroding in contact with sulfur. So that silver acts as a sponge and sponges away the
> sulfur in bacteria leaving them to die. So that any bacteria that require sulfur would
> be killed on exposure to elemental-silver. But virus do not require sulfur, I hazard
> to guess and so silver is not a viricide. But many species, perhaps all species of
> bacteria require sulfur in their constitution and thus silver can kill them.

You may find the paper:

Feng, Q. L., J. Wu, G. Q. Chen, F. Z. Cui, T. N. Kim, and J. O. Kim. 2000. A mechanistic
study of the antibacterial effect of silver ions on Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus
aureus. J. Biomed. Mater. Res. 52:662-668. [PubMed][Full Text]

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/73503276/ABSTRACT

interesting. I have a copy of the full paper I got at the research library, but can only
find the abstract on the net.

Marshall

Relevant Pages