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COLLOIDAL SILVER The Universal Germicide COLLOIDAL SILVER The Universal Germicide Through the ages, silver has been used to fight disease-causing organisms. Some think it has a bright future for treating a multitude of medical conditions including AIDS and cancer. ilver has long been known for its special properties. The people of ancient Greece and Rome used silver containers for keeping liquids fresh. Through the centuries, royal households carried on this practice by storing their provisions in silver con- tainers. Privileged family members used silver eating utensils; they had their meals served on silver plates and their drinks served in silver cups. Indeed, the skin of ‘blue bloods' reportedly had a bluish tinge due to the minute traces of pure metallic silver they regularly consumed. In American pioneering days, new settlers travelling to the West would put silver dollars in their milk to delay spoiling. By the turn of the 20th century, silver was regarded as a proven germ-fighter. In medi- cine, a solution known as Colloidal Silver was commonly used as a mainstay of antibacte- rial treatment. Although considered to be ‘high tech’ at that time, the type of solution was technically inferior compared to today's colloidal silver solutions. One of the drawbacks was that the particle size of the silver never reached its optimum ultramicroscopic size and thus its highest level of efficacy. Back then, highly effective colloidal silver was very expensive to produce. The phar- maceutical industry wanted faster-working drugs that were cheaper and patentable. In addition, when manufactured improperly, or taken at hundreds of times the proper dosage with extraneous silver compounds included, a permanent skin discolouration, called argyria, could result. For these reasons, colloidal silver fell out of favour. Even so, such prestigious journals as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet (1914) pub- lished the results of scientific studies and examined the many successful uses of colloidal silver. In 1910, Dr Henry Crooks, a pioneer in colloidal chemistry, wrote that: "...certain metals, when in a colloidal state, have a highly germicidal action but are quite harmless to human beings...it may be applied in a much more concentrated form and with better results... Bronchial tuberculosis...Staphylococcus pyogenes, various Streptococci and other pathogenic organisms are all killed in three to four minutes; in fact, no microbe is known that is not killed by this colloid in laboratory experiments in six minutes, [and] the concentration of the [silver] does not exceed twenty-five parts per million..." In 1919, Alfred Searle, founder of the pharmaceutical conglomerate of the same name, wrote in his book, The Use of Colloids in Health and Disease, that: "applying colloidal silver to human subjects has been done in a large number of cases with astonishingly successful results. For internal administration, orally or hypodermical- ly it has the advantage of being rapidly fatal to parasites without toxic action on its host. It is quite stable." Compiled from a selection of articles downloaded from the Internet, including: "Colloidal Silver: The Amazing Alternative to Antibiotics" © The Association for Advanced Colloidal Research and "Colloidal Silver: The Natural Antibiotic Alternative" © by Zane Baranowski COLLOIDAL SILVER REAPPRAISED Much later, in the 1970s, colloidal silver once again became a valued substance. Doctors at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, stumbled upon it while searching for effective treatments for burns victims, having tried many other medicines. Biomedical research has shown that no known disease-causing organism—bacteria, virus or fungus—can live for more than a few minutes in the presence of even minute traces of metallic silver. Jim Powell reported in an article, "Our Mightiest Germ Fighter", published in Science Digest (March 1978, pp. 59-60): "Thanks to eye-opening research, silver is emerging as a wonder of modern medicine. NEXUS - 39 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH DECEMBER 1996 - JANUARY 1997