
Silver makes antibiotics thousands of times more effective - nmc
http://www.nature.com/news/silver-makes-antibiotics-thousands-of-times-more-effective-1.13232
======
pvnick
Any sort of improvement over current antibiotics would be a godsend as the
idea of antibiotic-resistance "superbugs" is arguably a ticking timebomb that
presents an existential threat to modern society.

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.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Antibiotic resistance is definitely not an existential threat. Most people do
not catch any bacterial diseases that would be fatal if untreated before their
reproductive years.

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.

~~~
refurb
I would agree. Humans survived up all the way up until the point antibiotics
were discovered, so why wouldn't they survive if all antibiotics suddenly
became ineffective?

Sure you'd see average life expectancy drop dramatically, but I don't think
you'd see humans die out as a species.

~~~
salmonellaeater
The number of people each person comes into contact with daily has increased
dramatically. Basically the R0 of most diseases is much higher:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infectious_disease)

------
meritt
Ahhh yeah, colloidal silver is making a comeback!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Alternat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver#Alternative_medicine)

~~~
colanderman
From your link:

"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"

~~~
gngeal
Obviously, it's the colloidal silver version of homeopathy! I just hope the
authors of the article haven't lulled themselves into thinking that they've
just invented a silver bullet for infections.

~~~
viraptor
The idea of homeopathy tries to make the solutions "stronger" by dissolving
them with water. It's the main process behind it - the point where you're
pretty much left with just water.

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.

~~~
eru
> [...] by dissolving them with water.

I thought they mostly used sugar or alcohol (depending on substance).

------
Retric
; but unfortunately silver also kills people.

PS: yet another [http://xkcd.com/1217/](http://xkcd.com/1217/)

~~~
steve19
There are many people who are allergic to penicillin. That does not make it
any less useful to the rest of the population.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin_drug_reaction](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin_drug_reaction)

~~~
Alex3917
> There are many people who are allergic to penicillin. That does not make it
> any less useful to the rest of the population.

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.

~~~
DenisM
Peanuts are fatal to some people, yet we eat them all the time. Here's a
counter-example to your first claim. Another one is Fugu fish, which I
personally ate at a restaurant, and which are known to be deadly if not
prepared correctly.

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?

~~~
Alex3917
> Peanuts are fatal to some people, yet we eat them all the time.

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.

~~~
DenisM
>Peanuts are banned from most schools.

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?

~~~
Alex3917
I wasn't claiming that there are no potentially dangerous foods that you can
buy at restaurants, only that there are many potentially dangerous foods that
you can't buy at restaurants.

~~~
foobarbazqux
What are some more examples that are not mushrooms? Genuinely curious.

~~~
Alex3917
I'm more familiar with mushrooms than plants. But are a ton of plants that
aren't served for various reasons. In terms of plants that aren't served
specifically because they have a high likelihood of causing bad reactions, I'm
not sure -- milkweed and certain species of fiddleheads might be good
examples. There are lots of different reasons for why certain foods aren't
commercially available, and often it's just completely arbitrary. E.g. the
reason you can't buy coca tea is that Obama doesn't recognize religions
different from Christianity as being valid. (His administration specifically
lobbied the UN not to let South Americans use it for religious purposes.)

~~~
Alex3917
@foobarbazqux

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:

[http://boingboing.net/2011/06/09/grasshopper-tacos-
ba.html](http://boingboing.net/2011/06/09/grasshopper-tacos-ba.html)

~~~
foobarbazqux
So yeah, the FDA caters to big industry, and the meat coming out of feedlots
is scarier than your typical roadkill, but this is pretty well-known.

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.

------
tokenadult
I read this interesting submission and the comments to date while I thought
about this issue. I see the HN participant posting this story is new here,
making his first article submission.

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](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.

~~~
contingencies
"Adjuvant"! _[C17: from Latin adjuvāns, present participle of adjuvāre, from
juvāre to help]_ Cheers for a new scrabble word for the armory, _tokenadult_!
The fungi point is a good one, well done for bringing it up. Ditto
interpretive guidelines. The breadth of your knowledge is, as always,
impressive.

------
Fishkins
Although the title here closely matches the article title, it seems
overstated/optimistic. The actual line in the article is "when boosted with a
small amount of silver these drugs could kill between 10 and 1,000 times as
many bacteria." That's a big range. Of course, this still could end up being
quite useful.

------
nmc
Granted, including "could" in the title would have been less misleading, given
they indeed mention a "10x to 1000x" range. But I think readers should focus
more on the outstanding scientific progress than on the slightly-overselling
title.

Notably, the effect on bacteria membranes, and the ability to make
antibiotics-resistant bacterias vulnerable to silver-buffed antibiotics.

------
LandoCalrissian
Reminds me of this funny story: [http://www.today.com/id/32774116/ns/today-
today_news/t/blue-...](http://www.today.com/id/32774116/ns/today-
today_news/t/blue-man-still-man-different-color/)

~~~
CamperBob2
I really liked his quote:

    
    
      (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.
    

That will resonate with any introverts who have found themselves in a role
that requires speaking in public.

------
ars
I wonder if copper would also work. Copper is just as toxic to bacteria, but
is more "bio-active" in the body.

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).

~~~
boon
Copper can be problematic in high doses, but usually only when proper
copper/zinc ratios are not maintained.

------
vrepsys
If all the articles saying we're close to making something 1000x more
effective, faster, better etc. were true I would probably be writing this
comment while driving a solar powered flying car to my home on a moon base.

Really wish it was true.

------
adamconroy
One important point that seems to be missed is that they really want to
isolate what mechanism is causing the effect rather than planning to dose
everyone with silver.

------
ommunist
As a natural selection factor it will lead to flourishing microbal cultures
which are 1000x times more deadly than current cocci.

------
NatCrodo
Silver as adjunct treatment for infection sounds promising. I'm curious how
this will turn out in the future.

------
patricklorio
So does this mean there is some truth to the "magic healing power" of silver
water?

------
adamconroy
I like the sound of overdosing on silver and permanently turning blue / grey

------
lvs
you know what else makes antibiotics more effective? bleach. this paper is
ridiculous. figure 4: no tested amount of silver nitrate is noncytotoxic. end
of story.

~~~
ars
So don't use silver nitrate. Elemental silver has low toxicity, they should be
able to find some salt with also low toxicity.

------
nsxwolf
... in a petri dish.

------
CyberDroiD
I'm looking forward to tiny nanotech robots that can be deployed on search and
destroy missions.

------
pearjuice
Have fun with the biotics which will grow resistant after a while!

~~~
jessaustin
Antibiotics are a recent human invention, so it isn't surprising that
resistance to them is still increasing. Silver, on the other hand, has been
present in the environment since before bacteria evolved. If there was an
accessible pathway to silver resistance, it would have been found in several
billion years.

~~~
kvb
The genes for penicillin resistance predate the use of penicillin as an
antibiotic. Perhaps there are genes which confer silver resistance which will
be increasingly expressed as silver is used as a treatment.

~~~
viraptor
That sounds interesting, but have you got a link to that paper/explanation?
With the mutations happening all the time it seems to me like the question
"can you step twice into the same river?" is close to what applies in this
case.

------
richkuo
Attention all vampires: They are on to us!

------
konklone
Be honest - who here for a second thought this meant that Nate Silver had
improved the effectiveness of antibiotics?

