For thousands of years, precious metal have been
utilized to fight infections. However, it has been a mystery for sometime on
how some, like silver, can disrupt bacteria. According to James Collins, a biomedical
engineer at Boston University, silver may help fight against “drug-resistant
bacteria such as Stenotrophomonas maltophilia.” Silver as dissolved ions makes
the cell membrane more permeable and interferes with the cell’s metabolism.
This leads to the overproduction of reactive and toxic oxygen compounds which
could possibly make today’s antibiotics more effective.
Silver is shown to be effective on “Gram-negative bacteria’
that can often be impenetrable to antibiotics. The overproduction of oxygen
compounds resulting from silver ions increases the bacteria’s membrane
permeability which allows antibiotics to enter and shut down their resistance
mechanisms. However, the toxicity of silver has to be taken into account before
adding it to antibiotics.
I found this article interesting because silver in antibiotics
has been controversial in terms of its effectiveness. Many science articles
such as WebMD often claim that silver
has no known functions in the body nor is it an essential mineral support. Moreover,
silver (to be more specific, colloidal silver) products marketed for “medical
purposes or promoted for unproven uses are not considered ‘misbranded’ under
the law.” It will probably take some more time to diagnose more tests of silver
as an agent in antibiotics before it is believable that it does treat
infections such as tuberculosis, Lyme disease, pneumonia, and so on.
Submitted by Hanh L. Pham
No comments:
Post a Comment