Silver makes antibiotics thousands of times more effective
nature.com
nature.com
Right now the most common antibiotics we have (eg penicillin + synthetic derivatives) use a B-lactam ring to disrupt cell wall production. Now we start to see bacteria that are resistant to this attack, eg MRSA (Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus), that in worst-case scenarios make even simple surgical procedures life-threatening.
Then we bring in the big guns, things like Vancomycin that disrupt cell wall production using different methods. But then we start to see Vancomycin-resistant microorganisms. So governments limit Vancomycin use so as to not give bacteria the opportunity to evolve and develop resistance. Thus drug manufacturers are unwilling to research new antibiotics because they can't make a profit off of restricted-access antibiotics.
So it's largely a game of cat and mouse that could very well result in a deadly worldwide epidemic. New ways of looking at the problem such as the one described in the article could, without even being hyperbolic, save billions of lives.
That doesn't mean it's a good situation, but existential threat is greatly overstating the problem. People would have to have an extra baby, MAYBE.
With no antibiotics, the bacteria would spread more rapidly, and more people would be sick, and die, right?
>presents an existential threat to modern society
What responders seem to be responding to:
>presents an existential threat to humanity
The latter one is obviously wrong. The former, I think it's more likely than not that it's wrong. Sure, globalization would make bacterial outbreaks more likely but simple things like more frequent hand washing and wearing surgical masks any time you're out in public would cut the infection rate down tremendously.
There are many societal things we could do to improve society's chances of survival before antibiotic resistance would become an existential threat to society.
It's possible that there would be large societal changes if the ability to undergo surgery or work in risky professions is hampered by an increased risk of lethal infections.
Also, notice I intentionally said an existential threat to society, not humanity. It's fair to say that no longer being able to perform surgical procedures safely would be very destabilizing to modern society.
Our bodys' immune systems have been around for a while. If bacteria haven't become resistant to them by now, I don't see any immediate threat.
Forget about promiscuity vs. insularity- modern society is not built on the backs of twenty-year-olds. If humans suddenly did not survive much past their prime reproductive age, humanity would survive with absolute ease, but modern society would undergo dramatic change.
Sure you'd see average life expectancy drop dramatically, but I don't think you'd see humans die out as a species.
I wonder about that. I'll bet the drop would be pretty small if we started the aggressive public health measures they took before antibiotics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infec...
Vancomycin used to be a big gun, but not really any longer. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancomycin
From the article:
For many years since its initial use, vancomycin has traditionally been reserved as a drug of "last resort"... Recently, however, vancomycin resistant organisms are becoming common. Thus, vancomycin is increasingly being displaced from this role by newer antibiotics
>So governments limit Vancomycin use so as to not give bacteria the opportunity to evolve and develop resistance.
Vancomycin actually has a high hurdle to use naturally. It possesses poor oral bioavailability; it must be given intravenously for most infections. It can't be abused as easily by doctors prescribing it for things like colds because you have to be hooked up to an IV to get it.
Having said that, it is still a very old antibiotic (from 1953) and resistance has built up from its use. A few months ago I had Vancomycin + Ciprofloxacin administered intravenously for four days due to an infection following a severe puncture wound to my foot. It's still prescribed but it's not "the big guns" it used to be.
If it gets bad enough, outpatient antibiotics use will be a thing of the past. Need antibiotics? You're staying in a facility where someone will monitor you and make sure you take the full course and don't make our resistance problems worse. It won't necessarily be a hospital and you won't necessarily be watched by doctors or nurses, but compliance will be mandatory and enforced. Society has ways of defending itself.
I hope it doesn't get that bad, but needs must, when the Devil calls the tune.
The only solution is to get the medical profession to stop shotgunning antibiotics at every problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Alternat...
"Colloidal silver preparations primarily deliver inactive metallic silver, rather than the active microbicidal silver ion."
From TFA:
"Collins and his team found that silver — in the form of dissolved ions — attacks bacterial cells"
Nothing like that is claimed here. This idea is based on how ions of silver interact with cells which was also described. You may not agree with the article, but comparing it to homeopathy is just silly.
I thought they mostly used sugar or alcohol (depending on substance).
Colloidal silver has been shown to have antibacterial properties in vitro (in a petri dish or test tube), and in fact it is still used by NASA and the World Health Organization as a drinking water disinfectant, but no evidence has ever shown it effective in vivo (used internally in a living being).
It's impossible to find serious information on it though because of all the quackery.
I'd love to not need antibiotics for those things, but they are often very effective: I stop being sick from one day to the next.
I've got BMW silver-impregnated socks and they just never smell even after a full day in boots. My wife has used colloidal silver gel on burns (she's a nurse) and it's an incredible anti-bacterial agent. Silver, like ozone, needs to be treated with respect for medical purposes and you're sadly right that there's a good deal of nonsense out there but it does work.
If anecdote is all you have to offer, however, please refrain from troubling us with reading it.
On topic, didn't we see some similar claims a few years back about sugar increasing the effectiveness of antibiotics greatly?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110511134215.ht... [original paper] http://www.bu.edu/abl/files/nature_allison_letter.pdf
Well then he's an idiot and has been drinking it every day ignoring the MASSIVE ALL CAPS WARNINGS not to. I've used colloidal silver internally maybe three times in the last five years.
This isn't silly like arguing against thermodynamics, but it is an extraordinary claim and anecdotes are just not going to cut it.
It's not an extraordinary claim at all: silver in small concentrations is well known to be an anti-bacterial agent. I've used it against dysentery. It worked. In gel form it heals burns and keeps them sterile with nary a gauze in sight. Motorcycle manufacturers churn out pairs of socks by the million which are polyester impregnated with silver. They stay fresh.
This isn't quite 'Nobel Prize' territory but it would be a sea change in the scientific literature and it goes without saying that we can always use a new antibiotic.
If you think that the scientific literature about pharmaceuticals is this wonderfully neutral repository of human knowledge, untrammeled by commercial interest, bad science, junk test results and plain old fraud, then be my guest.
If anecdote is all you have to offer, however, please refrain from troubling us with reading it.
Naah, I'm just getting warmed up. How about good old oxygen? I have first hand experience of people with full blown AIDS going into full remission after ozone therapy. It's almost trivial to do too: get the patient's blood - if you can call the horrible black sludge that someone with a CD-4 count of 20 has blood, but never mind - ozonate it until it's cherry red, and stick it back in him. Lather, rinse, repeat. No anti-retrovirals or hellishly expensive treatements, just oxygen. Unpatentable and of course not profitable. And therein lies the heart of our problem with modern medicine.
The Rosemary Jacobs history reloaded:
For that matter, I'm curious why topical delivery of antibiotics via a sinus rinse isn't used either. Maybe it's just not an effective way of delivering them. I don't know, I'm not a doctor.
Legitimate or not, it /sounds/ just like the same bullshit from the 90s.
PS: yet another http://xkcd.com/1217/
There are tons of delicious foods that you can't buy in any restaurant or store no matter how much you're willing to pay, because a small percentage of people are allergic or whatever. So the entire population gets essentially zero use out of them even though they could be useful to the vast majority of people. (In fact, restaurants/stores/farmers markets only carry only a small percentage of the total foods out there.) Similarly a ride at an amusement park that is safe for the vast majority of people is a ride that no one is going to be allowed to go on.
Medicine is just a special case because doctors generally won't lose their license for killing the occasional patient, whereas, say, a restaurateur probably would.
Rollercoaster is dangerous to anyone with weak skeleton, and can likely induce heart attack as can a horror movie. Here's a counter-example to your other claim.
Do you have any examples that support your claims?
I did not find anything special in it, by the way. :)
Peanuts are banned from most schools.
> Another one is Fugu fish, which I personally ate at a restaurant, and which are known to be deadly if not prepared correctly.
That applies to most foods, e.g. tomatoes, rhubarb, etc.
When is the last time you had chicken-of-the-woods in a restaurant though? Oh wait, never. Because 90% of people find them delicious, but the other 10% cyanose and then start projectile vomiting and shitting themselves. Of course on your own that's not a big deal because you just bioassay it on yourself first, but in a restaurant that doesn't work.
Well, that's a far cry from you can't buy in any restaurant or store no matter how much you're willing to pay.
So, we have established there are foods that are dangerous and can be had at a restaurant (raw fish, raw meat, peanuts, fugu), and there could be some foods that are dangerous and cannot be had at a restaurant (chicken-of-the-woods).
That's much less dramatic now, is it not?
Kind of an extreme example, though. I don't think that it justifies the notion that society suffers under a tragedy of many useful foods being unavailable. I also would need to be persuaded of that.
There are other animal-based ones that aren't really health related. E.g. restaurants aren't allowed to serve meat that's not FDA inspected, but the FDA only inspects a small variety of meats. There was a restaurant in SF that was serving cricket tacos and they got shut down because of this:
My understanding is that although there are a ton of regulations restricting the sale of food, the health reasons cited are generally dubious, rather than genuine. The chicken-of-the-woods thing is obviously genuine, and I'd believe the same for a lot of different mushrooms. I've purchased about 20 species of wild fungi and I'm basically content with that variety. Raw milk / cheese I would say was a dubious health reason.
Side note: if a reply link isn't there, you just need to wait a bit longer.
Not being a US citizen, I really don't care about your politics, but these sort of nonsensical comments really stand out.
First time I hear about that. An US thing?
Long before it kills anyone, it may turn them blue. And if that is happening, chances are you are taking way too much. Too much of any good thing is a bad idea.
Some of the comments surprised me, as they seem to assume that antibiotics as a category of substances are only a few decades old. In fact, many of the first antibiotics in clinical use were "natural" substances, namely mycotoxins secreted by fungi in an endless chemical warfare arms race for living in a world full of bacteria. The reason that antibiotics are useful for human medicine is that fungi are much more biochemically similar to animals (like us) than bacteria are, being our comparatively near evolutionary cousins as fellow eukaryotes, and as such they are naturally selected to produce antibacterial mycotoxins that may be highly effective against broad groups of bacteria while being largely harmless to most animal tissues. But as the article notes, and as we would expect from evolution by natural selection, various strains of bacteria have been selected by differential survival to be more or less resistant to current antiobiotics.
Silver as an adjuvant for antibiotics may have some clinical usefulness. The research reported in the article here is laboratory rather than clinical research. There are many more steps to take before knowing whether or not this is a useful approach for human medicine, including carefully controlled clinical trials of safety and effectiveness. The reporter who wrote this news brief was careful to interview another scientist who warns that silver is toxic to human tissues as well as too bacteria, so dosage will be a crucial issue.
The obligatory link for any discussion of a preliminary research finding like this article is the essay "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig, LISP hacker and director of research at Google, on how to interpret scientific research.
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
Check each submission to Hacker News you read for how many of the important issues in interpreting research are NOT discussed in the submission. Here we still need to wait for actual human clinical trials to know if the addition of silver to antibiotic treatments will have adequate safety and effectiveness.
AFTER EDIT: I'm going to an appointment for my children, so I'll be away from the discussion for a while. I'm not sure what the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on this comment means so far, as replies haven't explained yet what other readers think about this comment.
Notably, the effect on bacteria membranes, and the ability to make antibiotics-resistant bacterias vulnerable to silver-buffed antibiotics.
(TODAY anchor Matt) Lauer asked him if being on TODAY
helped bring him out of his shell.
“I didn’t have much choice. I couldn’t find the cave I was
looking for,” Karason said with his characteristic
self-deprecating humor.
This can be both good and bad: Good in that the body can actually remove the copper from the body (unlike silver which stays there permanently). And bad in that copper may be more toxic (don't know).
Really wish it was true.
Is it possible that we will eventually produce strains resistant to even this? Yes. Is the answer to just give up drop all attempts at antibiotics? Probably not.
But those resistant strains will be outcompeted by non-resistant strains without the presence of anti-biotics.
There is a fitness cost to most resistance mechanisms [1]
If it gets bad enough, outpatient antibiotics use will be a thing of the past. Need antibiotics? You're staying in a facility where someone will monitor you and make sure you take the full course and don't make our resistance problems worse. It won't necessarily be a hospital and you won't necessarily be watched by doctors or nurses, but compliance will be mandatory and enforced.
I hope it doesn't get that bad.
It's possible that there exist some strange bacteria that feed on sulfur components and live inside mines with high silver concentration that have special mechanism to handle silver, but I think they are not very happy eating meat.
Fungus could tell another history, about how they design, make and use exactly the same compounds since thousands, maybe millions of years for the same purposes.
For example, I would consider osmosis to be a "fundamental chemistry" form of action. The only organisms I know of that can tolerate ridiculously high osmotic pressures are extremophiles. They developed resistance, yes, but they had the opportunity to gradually develop on the fringes of these extreme environments, instead of simply being dropped into a pool of salt.