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.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=....silver-makes-antibiotics...-thousands-of-times-more-effective
I think most board regulars/lurker readers :o)
Are aware of colloidal silver - trouble is they can't patent it
- so if c/s does what it says in the above, why the add antibiotics
(other than excuse to then charge the earth for a patentable product of course)
...as once c/s does the business ....your immune system (I will say.... probably :o)
- can probably finish the job
Plus side at least patients may benefit (at last) from the silver
- &....another demand booster for silver too !