"They all contain a huge variety of different silver forms and sometimes the form that should have been in there was maybe 30 percent and the other 70 percent were other silver forms," Nowack said. In multiple studies, he and his colleagues have found that the forms of silver supposedly present in these high-tech textiles are rarely what are actually embedded in the fabric. "They may add a compound but maybe during the manufacturing, all this dying and making of the fabric, they may transform some of the materials," Nowack told Live Science. In fact, manufacturers may not even know what they're making. The problem, according to Bernd Nowack, a researcher at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, is that you don't know what you're getting in these silver-infused fabrics. Some manufacturers have taken silver's antimicrobial magic as a marketing opportunity, creating silver-infused textiles that purport to stop smelly bacteria from setting up shop in the fabric. A Wounds International working group of medical professionals, however, argued in 2012 that the dressings can be useful for localized infections. There are debates within the field, however, about the efficacy of these dressings, particularly after a 2010 review published in the Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews found that they don't speed wound healing.
The positively charged silver ion interferes with bacterial cell walls and disrupts other microbial processes.īurn patients may use silver-antibiotic creams on their injuries, and some hospitals use silver-infused dressings for skin ulcers and other wound care. The metal works against bacteria only in ion form - it must lose an electron to become positively charged.
Silver doesn't kill microbes in its metallic form, in which it is unreactive.
Silver's antimicrobial properties have put this element in the doctor's bag of tricks according to Wounds International, silver has been used to prevent the infection of injuries for hundreds of years. Researchers are working to create nanometer-thick coatings that can replace the current hand-painted lacquers with something thinner, completely invisible and longer lasting. So how do a museum's silver pieces stay so shiny? They're coated with transparent lacquers.