David: Thanks for an absolutely smashing report.. I just love it. Faith G.
----- Original Message ----- From: alchemysa To: silver-list@eskimo.com Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 6:07 PM Subject: CS>Argyria yes. Other side effects no. Argyria is the real deal but the other side effects are speculation. A few months ago I tracked the claims of seizures, neurological problems, kidney damage, indigestion, headaches, fatigue, etc, as far as I could and have found they were barely credible. The FDA gets its info from the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine. http://nccam.nih.gov/health/alerts/silver/ In turn, the NCCAM gets its info from the Natural Medicine Comprehensive Database. http://www.naturaldatabase.com I subscribed to that service and found that most of the claims are based on the speculative idea that drinking colloidal silver might induce the same symptoms as Metal Fume Fever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fume_fever Basically, metal fume fever is what you get if you inhale lungfulls of toxic metal fumes such as from welding galvanised iron or working in a metal foundry. The other main reference listed in the NMCD database is 'Silver Products for Medical Indications, Risk benefit Assessment , Journal of Toxicology 1996 Fung and Bowen'. I couldnt find this paper anywhere on the net so I had to buy it from the National Library. Its 8 pages, almost entirely about argyria, but with a couple of very unconvincing hypothesis', mentioned almost as an aside, that silver might cause other symptoms. The trail for the source of these hypothesis' then gets even more blurred. But I think they are based on experiments in the mid 80's in which rats were fed high doses of silver nitrate every day until they started to get a bit cranky. (About 140 days straight as I recall). Even the researchers in those experiments concluded that the doses were so high that they bore no relevence to a real human situation. So in the end I'd have to say that the proof that silver causes side effects other than argyria is extremely unconvincing. A few months ago here in Australia the TGA (our FDA) published an alert that colloidal silver had caused in an elderly man 'debilitating fatigue accompanied by blue skin discolouration, dilated cardiomyopathy, amnesia and incoherent speech.' On three ocassions I asked the TGA to add some reference to the alert that proves that silver could cause any of these symptons other than argyria. They couldn't, and in the end simply said that the doctors diagnosis was good enough for them. I asked 'How can a doctor make such a diagnosis when theres no research to prove that silver can cause such a thing?' They had no answer for that other than "Go away". David Fox News states: The FDA does not consider colloidal silver safe or effective to treat any disease or condition. In fact, taking it could have serious side effects, such as: - Argyria - which is an irreversible blue-gray discoloration of your skin, nails and gums - Seizures and other neurological problems - Kidney damage - Indigestion - Headaches - Fatigue - Skin irritation
