In Tiny doses.. Silver? Helps wounds heal and kills bacteria?

In a presentation in front of the “American Chemical Society” - was held in Washington, D.C.- scientist “Ankit Agarwal” revealed that he had came up with an approach to healing that can kill 99.9999%!!! of bacteria in a wound using a natural substance… Silver. His claim is that hes found a way to help skin heal by using tiny, targeted nanoparticles of the metal. This could be of use for diabetics that have the chance of amputations and help victims of severe burns heal with fewer complications from infection, too. This reminds me of the starfish like limbs story…

The idea of using silver as a healing tool is not new.. In fact Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician known as the father of modern medicine, wrote - silver has beneficial, anti-disease properties. Silver is often used today to prevent wound dressings from becoming contaminated with bacteria. However, the larger loads normally used by Western medicine can damage the skin. That has made doctors, especially those who treat burn victims, shy away from using silver to heal wounds.

Agarwal, a postdoctoral researcher of the University of Wisconsin Madison, believes he’s come up with a way to take advantage of silver’s anti/bacterial properties while still avoiding skin damage and actually promoting the healing of damaged skin. Extremely small doses delivered precisely -

Scientists have known cells in the bodies of humans/mammals are sensitive to silver - but bacteria are much more sensitive then cells. So the key to killing bacteria without harming skin cells is to concentrate the silver that kills infection-causing bacteria but doesn’t harm the skin cells needed for healing. Agarwal has done just that.

Combining 21st century high tech engineering with the ancient natural healing powers of silver, ultra-thin material capable of carrying extraordinarily small amounts of the precious metal has been created. One square inch of this material contains a tiny amount, only about 0.4% of the silver found in the silver/treated antibacterial bandages now used in medicine that can damage skin.

Agarwal in laboratory tests, demonstrated that the low concentration of silver killed 99.9999 percent of the bacteria but didn’t damage “fibroblasts” cells that are needed to repair a wound.

Agarwal created the experimental material by alternately dipping a glass plate in two solutions of oppositely charged polymers and then adding the precise dose of silver needed. The resulting layers form a kind of sandwich of ultra thin material that stick together through electrical attraction(woo). The final size of the “silver laced treatment” material ranges from a few nanometers to several hundred nanometers in thickness. One nanometer is one billionth of a meter .One human hair is nearly 60,000 nanometers in diameter.

Silver must take the form of charged particles to kill bacteria… or ions, and the commercial wound dressings now in use contain a large dose of silver ions which are released quickly with little control. But the tiny silver nanoparticles that Agarwal embed is his high tech silver sandwich material that can be designed too release ions for days or weeks if needed. “We are putting the silver where we need it, so we can use a small loading of silver, which does not exhibit toxicity to mammalian cells because the silver is precisely targeted,” Nicholas Abbott, a professor of chemical and biological engineering who works with Agarwal, had explained in the media statement.

Now I wonder how beneficial this could be with the research developed from starfish limb regeneration..

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