When surfing the net, you can never tell what products work and which fail to measure up to their advertisements.  Many people try products and are disappointed.  Well, we have decided to save you the hassle of buying another product blindly. We found Colloidal Silver being advertised on web at the address www.utopiasilver.com.  It was being marketed as a cheaper way to not only get rid of illnesses, but as well as an agent that would help prevent illnesses. According to the product description,” it is a very effective antibiotic.  It kills pathogens including bacteria, viruses, yeast, mold fungus and parasites.”  All you have to do is take a few teaspoons of Colloidal Silver everyday and you remain healthy. There were multiple testimonials regarding efficacy of Colloidal Silver. Some things sound too good to be true.  It was our goal to test Colloidal Silver to see if it is in fact too good to be true. The reason was because there was not much evidence or data given on the website to back those claims up. 

            There were many convincing testimonials given on the website.  There are testimonials for almost every type of illness or disorder you can imagine.  Among the illnesses or disorders that are claimed to be treated are everything from ear infections, to decreasing the severity of the symptoms of AIDS/HIV.  It can be used to purify water, treat animals and plants as well.  People claim that they have used other expensive antibiotics that seem to be less effective than the Colloidal Silver, and have chosen to use Colloidal Silver because of cost and effectiveness.

            There are many different types of bacteria living around us everyday.  They’re in our bodies, food and air.  Often times when we get a bacterial infection it causes our bodies to put energy into fighting off the bacteria until it is demolished.  Antibiotics like, Kanamycin, Streptomycin and Ampicillin, help to kill colonies of bacteria infecting our bodies, allowing our bodies to get healthier faster.  The faster bacteria is eliminated from our bodies, the faster we will recover.  In order to be effective in healing people, Colloidal Silver would have to show the same abilities to kill bacteria.

            Colloidal Silver is a suspension of silver particles in water.  Colloidal Silver by the electrical method, contains both ions and particles.  The website claims that Colloidal Silver is a pure safe mineral element and that is impossible to overdose on and does not interact with other medications.  They do however, list two side effects, which include diarrhea and or a process called the “healing crisis” which can be eliminated by drinking a lot of water.

            What we wanted to determine was whether or not Colloidal Silver was effective in killing bacteria as it was claimed to be. We used the bacteria known as C600, which is a strain of the E. Coli bacteria.  We ran a series of experiments mixing different amounts of Colloidal Silver with C600 as well as other bacteria to test their effectiveness. We also mixed C600 with antibiotics, Kanamycin, Streptomycin, and Ampicillin, in the hopes of having a “competitor” to compare it to.  We discovered, that though often times not as effective as antibiotics such as Kanamycin, Streptomycin, and Ampicillin, the Colloidal Silver did eliminate a noticeable number of bacteria colonies.  When the Colloidal Silver was diluted and then compared to Kanamycin and Streptomycin, we found that the Colloidal Silver diluted was just as, if not more, effective than the Kanamycin diluted. We also tested the toxicity of the Colloidal Silver by feeding it to Fruit Flies and monitoring the death rate of the flies.  We found that the number of flies that died eating the Colloidal Silver food was relatively similar to the number of deaths of the flies eating the water-based food.  Therefore we concluded that the Colloidal Silver was not toxic.