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.