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Andrew Maynard

Nano’s silver lining is… Blue?

So you’ve developed an obsessive nano-silver Benny the Bear paw-chewing habit, and on the advice of your hairdresser, you’re quaffing silver nanoparticle suspensions by the pint.  What do you get?  

Well, according to a story airing on CNN this week, what you get is… blue skin!

According to the article, Paul Karason started the transition from fair skin and freckles to a decidedly bluish hue some fourteen years ago.  The culprit it seems is regular use of nanoparticle-containing colloidal silver.

The condition – known as argyria – came to prominence in 2002 following stories of the “True Blue” senate hopeful Stan Jones, who had been imbibing home-made colloidal silver since 1999 for medical reasons.

Argyria is extremely rare. It is not life-threatening (unless your neighbors are particularly intolerant), and it seems to be associated with colloidal silver doses orders of magnitude higher than those that are generally recommended. So the chances are that the occasional suck on Benny’s paw, or a surreptitious sip of your stylist’s nano-silver elixir, will cause no harm.

But it does make you think about how emerging nanomaterials might lead to unanticipated consequences if we don’t work out the rules of safe use before making them freely available.  

And as the unconstrained use of antimicrobial nano silver in products continues to grow, what about unanticipated consequences to sensitive ecosystems in the environment, where turning blue might be the least of our worries?

Although Karason admits it’s not easy living as a blue man, he is prepared to live with it for the rest of his life.  Personally, I think I would prefer to find nanotech solutions that don’t lead to the blues!

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Pages tagged "surreptitious" said:

January 6, 2008 07:38
 

Spencer Jonesy said:

Blaming "nanosilver" for what happened to Mr. Karason is almost inexcusable, considering the fact that he was making his own colloidal silver with a homemade colloidal silver generator, and was adding salt and baking soda to the concoction in order to increase the concentration of silver in the water.  In other words, he was producing the exact opposite of "nanosilver."

As I have been warning for the past 12 years, drinking excessive amounts of colloidal silver on a daily basis for long periods of time will indeed result in argyria for many people, particularly those with poor kidney and liver function.

That’s because the excessive daily intake of silver particles is more than their kidneys and liver can expel at any one time. This can result in a residual buildup of the silver particles in the body’s tissues each time a person drinks more silver than their excretory organs can expel.

Eventually, over time, the body tries to push this residual buildup of silver from the tissues out toward the skin, at which point the skin turns grey upon exposure to sunlight.

In much the same way you wouldn’t eat a half a bottle of vitamins a day unless you want to endure some potentially nasty side effects over time, you also can’t take excessive amounts of colloidal silver daily without eventually provoking a nasty side effect called argyria.

Most people are intelligent enough not to take the kind of huge daily dosages that would be necessary to stain your skin like this man has apparently done over the course of the past 12 years. But there are still many web sites out there that claim colloidal silver has “no side effects whatsoever” and that you can “drink all you want with no risk.” Those are blatantly untrue statements. And we have been sounding the alarm against such statements for years.

Again, just as you can’t take all of the vitamins you want every day without risk, so you can’t drink all of the colloidal silver you want each day without risk. If you take excessive quantities of colloidal silver daily for long periods of time, you do indeed risk contracting argyria (i.e., skin graying/bluing). It is not a guarantee you will become argyric. But it is a very real risk.

The key to avoiding side effects from colloidal silver, or from any other natural supplement for that matter, is the same one your mother taught you when you were a little child:

“Don’t overdo it; use MODERATION in all things.”

If an ounce of colloidal silver a day works well for you, then for goodness sakes don’t start thinking that maybe 16 ounces a day will be even better. It is that “more must be even better” mentality that ultimately produces these rare cases of side effects which the news media in turns capitalizes on in order to scare people away from using this otherwise safe and powerfully effective all-natural infection-fighting agent and immune system booster, which has been used by tens of millions of people worldwide since it was first invented in the late 1800’s shortly after Edison harnessed electricity.

For those interested in learning more about the responsible use of colloidal silver, be sure to visit www.thesilveredge.com and download the FREE special report titled “What's the "Safest" Daily Dosage for Colloidal Silver?” which uses the EPA’s (Environmental Protection Agency) own figures to determine how much colloidal silver is safe to take daily, based upon your own body weight. Just use the link located in the upper left-hand corner of the home page.

Finally, if you want to learn even more about the safe usage of colloidal silver, I am happy to announce that Life & Health Research Group has recently placed their one-hour, studio-quality Colloidal Silver Secrets video on sale for only twenty bucks. If features Steve Barwick, author of newly updated 547-page book, The Ultimate Colloidal Silver Manual, being interviewed relentlessly by television personality Kristyn Burtt on just about every aspect of colloidal silver usage you can imagine.

He even demonstrates how to make a crude, emergency colloidal silver generator out of common household implements in under two minutes. I don’t know how long they will keep this great 60-minute long video (available in DVD or VHS) available at such a low price, so you should check it out now at www.lifeandhealthresearchgroup.com

September 29, 2009 02:15

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