Are sliver nanoparticles good or bad for you?
To help answer this, we thought we'd round up seven facts
about silver nano that may surprise you
One: Silver nanoparticles are released from silverware.
Drink water from a silver jug or eat with a silver spoon
and you are drinking and eating silver nanoparticles.
As silverware has been around since Roman times we've been doing this for a couple
of millenia now
and of course if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth you've
probably been doing it
more than most.
Two: People have been intentionally dosing themselves with silver nanoparticles for
over a hundred years. Colloidal silver - suspensions of silver nanoparticles in a liquid -
were popular before modern antibiotics came along
Their use has become widespread again in recent years as a cure for
well if you read the claims almost anything apparently. There is no clear
evidence that
drinking colloidal silver is good for you, but evidence never stopped people
from self medicating before.
Three: Silver nanoparticles are pretty good at killing microbes
but it's the silver ions that they slowly release that do most of the
damage.
This means you don't necessarily need
nanoparticles make products that kill bugs using silver
for instance, the Michigan company Crypton
makes commercial fabrics used everywhere from Hyatt Hotels to McDonald's that
use silver ions
to inhibit bacterial growth and products using
X-Static silver technology are widely used by
athletes, the military, medics, and others. Both companies use silver as an
antibacterial agent
but as far as can be told neither company uses
nanoparticles.
Four: It's hard for pathogens to develop resistance to silver nanoparticles
because they interfere with microbes in multiple different ways.
However, indiscriminate use of silver as an antibacterial agent
could still increase the chances a resistance developing which
isn't great news if you're relying on it to protect particularly vulnerable
patients.
Five: If you're exposed to enough
silver it'll turn your skin blue, a condition called on Agryria.
This is cosmetically interesting
but not fatal. In fact it's thought that Royal were originally called Blue Bloods
because you guessed it those silver spoons turned their lips
delicate shade royal blue.
Six: Silver nanoparticles aren't likely to be much more dangerous than
other forms of silver in the human body as it's the ions that cause the most
damage.
Although it's still possible that research may throw up some surprises
nanoparticles for instance might find it easier to get to sensetive places like
inside cells before dissolving amd releasing their payload of silver ions.
And we may still find that the nanoparticles
trigger the body's immune system in ways that ions do not.
That said a couple of millenia of imbibing silver nanoparticles
hasn't thrown up any obvious risk red flags yet.
Seven: In contrast silver is bad news for the environment.
We learned this with environmental contamination from the photographic film
industry.
Silver nanoparticles were at least as harmful as the same amount of silver in any
other form - possibly more so if the nanoparticles gets places
other forms of silver cannot. This has got some people wondering whether
putting silver everything from socks and kids toys to bed sheets and carpets
is a bad idea.
To learn more about silver nanoparticles
check out the blurb below and as always please
do join the conversation in the comments.