There are several web sites that are marketing "Colloidal Silver" products that I believe are possibly dangerous, using blatant untruths & scare tactics, along with an emmotive (Unprofessional) writing style to draw custom.

The purpose of this page is NOT to rubbish these sites or for us to try and convince you that our product is better than theirs. It is here because we have many emails asking for answers to inconsistencies displayed on these sites and asking for our views. Some are understandably quite concerned.

I am limiting my findings, mainly to sites in the USA because that is where the greatest disparity seems to exist, probably because of the large and highly profitable Colloidal Silver industry that exists over there.

I always welcome comments and I would be interested in any views that you may have.

We are fortunate in the UK to have a free health service but its not the case in the USA. Health care is very expensive and as a result, there is a thriving natural /alternative industry providing a "Cheaper" alternative, all trying to compete for their market share, including commercial Colloidal Silver sites. I put "Cheaper" in quotes because it is only cheaper if it works.

When I first started my research many years ago, I couldn't believe the amount of information that was available. I started reading pages and pages of information but soon started to get quite confused. Up until then, I had found most articles on the Internet accurate and informative but when it came to the subject of Colloidal Silver there were many contradictions and even some blatant untruths. Many have in depth articles all of which are trying to convince you that their product is the best because it is different and some even infer that you would be stupid to buy from anyone else. As I later found out, nearly all of them were in the USA. I started to get quite disheartened and I ended up more confused than when I first started.

Eventually, I came across silvermedicine.org and because they are a nonprofit organisation, are unbiased. Their articles seem technically correct and the advice they give is excellent & certainly agreed with my technical background. I was then able to use them as a benchmark for comparison, which has enabled me to identify sites that are misleading, incorrect and some that are plainly using emotive language to make a sale.

My disheartenment soon turned to anger because some of the material on certain sites, is misleading, contradictory & in some cases totally wrong. Now I just find it highly embarrassing and I apologise that there are sites representing Colloidal Silver out there that use these tactics.

I am only going to mention a few sites but I will draw out my reasoning along side the quotes they have made. I am not deliberately attacking these sites or the owners but I do have concerns regarding the accuracy of what they have posted.

http://www.mts.net/~revive/index.html

http://www.silverproteinmild.com/SiteMapTable.html

http://www.xpressnet.com/bhealthy/

http://www.discovery-experimental.com/ghi_mri/ghi_mri.htm

http://www.colloidalsilverusa.com/index.html

Review of Invive using http://www.mts.net/~revive/index.html web site.

Quotes from the above site are in Bold Italics and Comments made by myself are written in this font.

Congratulations! By reading this you have displayed your wisdom with your interest in silver. Patronising. I don't need to be "Congratulated" for stumbling across your site and the wisdom will come after I have decided whether the information you give is accurate or not.

Congratulations again- You have now scrolled to the original 1938 broad spectrum Mild Silver Protein Colloidal Silver formula. So you use the original 1938 method to produce MSP, ignoring 70 years of progress?

The best, most current, and most impartial information on silver is at http://www.xpressnet.com/bhealthy.

***** How can it be impartial when you have obviously written it yourselves? *****

Competitors and charlatans have been giving our industry a bad name by: Producing and selling unstable "ionic" colloidal silver called "Colloidal Silver". Starting to get personal. The words "Pot" & "Kettle" come to mind. True, a purely Ionic solution is not Colloidal Silver but I wouldn't say it was unstable, as you will see below.

Well known supplement Companies, multinational health food stores, and backyard promoters with 20 p.p.m. to 300 p.p.m. ionic silver solutions are so crooked and deceitful that they take the "Medical Journal data that only applies to our INVIVE type of “compounded” Silver composed of ATOMS of powerful silver formulation, and apply it to their ionic products. Colloidal Silver also contains atoms of silver in the form of silver particles. Its only the transport mechanism that is different. To use the words "Crooked and deceitful" shows to me that the author is showing growing desperation to try and market their product. A good product stands on its own two feet & doesn't need to be written in an emotive form, which I find highly unprofessional.

IONIC SILVER “WILL” PRECIPITATE OUT: Clumping and aggregation of the solution occurs in all “ionic” solutions, resulting in an aggregation of the solution and precipitating of the product. This means that all you have left at the top of the bottle is water. Rubbish ! Actually its the particulate silver that is the delicate component because if the Zeta potential is lost, larger particles will be formed. The ionic content is quite stable unless other anions (-ve ions) are introduced such as chlorine, which is why we use distilled water. This shows a dangerous level of ignorance of basic chemistry (GCSE Level).

IONIC SILVER CONTAINS A TOXIC SOUP: Ionic silver is toxic because silver oxides and impurities are formed “during” the electrolysis process. It is a chemical soup because of oxidation and uncontrolled reactions such as “bridging” due to the electrical current applied and inter reaction with the sides of the vessels.

This is a scare tactic to discredit electrically isolated Colloidal Silver. Silver oxide is insoluble in water and will precipitate to the bottom of the reaction vessel. This is also true for silver chloride. Part of our quality control procedure is maturation and during this period, any silver salts produced, if at all, will precipitate out of solution leaving pure Colloidal Silver.

The production of silver oxide has no effect on the solution and its production doesn't make silver ions toxic! I have no idea what bridging is supposed to mean and most generators incorporate current limiting to prevent uncontrolled reactions. We don't apply a current- we apply a voltage and when the resistance of the solution starts to decrease, we lower the Voltage to maintain the current. V=IR & is called Ohm's law. You can't have a current without a voltage because everything has resistance, unless you are near -273 C but that's another story.

The above comment made by Invive is not only incorrect, the opposite is true. If silver was toxic, we would not use it for cutlery, utensils and for drinking out off & has never been raised as a health issue. Churches use silver chalices as the silver is antimicrobial and kills germs. Silver catheters are now being used in hospitals as it prevents infections. The EU recently issued a new regulation stating that lead is no longer permitted in solder etc. Other metals are listed but not silver. This is the RoHs directive and this Directive bans the placing on the EU market of new electrical and electronic equipment containing more than agreed levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants.

Lets see what Wikipedia has to say.

1. "The malleability, non-toxicity and beauty of silver...." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver
2. "Silver chloride is ...one of the few metal chlorides insoluble in water." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_chloride
3. "Silver oxide is ..... poorly soluble in water " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_oxide

IONIC SILVER LACKS AN ELECTRON:Ionic silver lacks an electron and is therefore unstable and is incapable of reacting in the body the same way as true Colloidal Silver: Wrong again ! Anyone with a basic understanding of GCSE Chemistry will remember that there are basically two types of chemical bonding. Ionic and covalent. Remember the periodic table ? Using a very simplistic viewpoint, the elements in the first 2-3 columns tend to react with the last three column except for the last column itself. The last column is the "Nobel Gases" such as Helium, Argon, Xenon which are the only elements that are stable in their elemental state. The rest of the elements tend to react with other elements to become stable. Got that ?

All atoms have a number of electrons in their outer orbit (Shells). They have a great affinity to have their outer shell fully populated. With metals, they have between 1 and three electrons in this shell and readily lose them such that the previous orbit is fully populated and stable. (We will ignore transition elements for simplicity). Elements such as chlorine & bromine lack only one electron & desperately want another and as such, metals such as silver will happily give up its electron to a desperate chlorine atom and form a stable ionic compound.

Sodium is also a metal and combines with chlorine to make an ionic compound called Sodium Chloride (NaCl) or common salt. You may remember at school been shown metallic sodium being cut with a knife and put into water where it buzzes around reacting quite violently. Chlorine was used to gas our troops in world war I.

Sodium Chloride is soluble and makes a solution called saline or if in enough quantity it is referred to as "The Sea" or an Ocean. The "Oceans" seem quite stable as far as the sodium ions are concerned and do not tend to precipitate out leaving fresh water at the surface. As you well know, NaCl is very stable and its difficult to get it to do anything else! You only see it when the water has been evaporated and it returns to its solid form.

The above comment by Invive suggests that all compounds that lack an electron are unstable, so the next time you have fish and chips, would you rather have some metallic sodium with a whiff of chlorine or have its ionic compound with missing electrons called table salt. The choice is yours.

I apologise for the sarcasm but this really does make me quite irritated!

As the action of Silver in the body stated is based on the incorrect premise that it is unstable, the opposite may well be true for its effectiveness in the body. Just a theory.

INVIVE is now offered "Stabilized and Enhanced". So its no longer the "Original 1938 broad spectrum Mild Silver Protein Colloidal Silver" if it has had to be stabilised and enhanced. Make your mind up. What is the stabiliser & what is the enhancer?

Casein is the Protein used in MSP. See test report http://www.silver-colloids.com/Reports/cpr28/cpr_28.html where it states "Products made with casein may cause allergic reactions in individuals who are allergic to milk. The presence of casein can cause anaphylaxis, a life threatening reaction, in susceptible individuals." Wikipideia states that "In a comprehensive 1989 nutrition study in China, known as The China Project, casein was found to have a direct correlation with tumor growth; it was suggested that casein may be a tumor promoter, though this is controversial."

The only mention of Argyria is a page showing a possible cure. There are no warnings or any information regarding this condition. Considering MSP is renowned as a possible cause, their lack of warnings is a major reason why I feel you should be cautious about this product.

Since the particles are usually large (1000 nanometers as determined by SEM ), suspension would not be possible without the stabilizer.

As the silver is chemically bonded to the protein, the body has to break this bond before the silver is available to help. Due to this and the large ineffective particle size, much higher concentrations are required which is the probable the causal link to Argyria. The ineffectiveness of the silver whilst still bonded to the protein has been identified under testing when bacteria were found in the samples !

If you look towards the bottom of the home page of http://www.xpressnet.com/bhealthy/ you will come across the Global Health Information and Medical Research, Inc. or "GHI/MRI". It is mentioned as a "Nonprofit" organisation and seems as though it is a totally impartial independent medical body. I haven't read the whole site because the first few lines are enough to make a conclusion, in my opinion. It seems the founder James Kimball has been jailed for his activities after being infiltrated by the FBI or FDA agent.

The fact that they mention this and use more emotive language totally discredits their medical standing and this is more a venue for "Venting their anger" and raising funds/help for the release of the above person.

Because of the style of writing & grammatical mistakes (Not that my spelling & grammar are good) I decided to look further because I suspect this "Institute" is not as unbiased as I assumed it would or should be. Both the domain registration details for Invive and the GHI/MHI are the same, which could be a coincidence, but their site registration information lacks any detail. Use the WHOIS service to see the detail if you wish to look for yourselves.

They seem to have multiple identities and multiple sites, all related. Why? We have one site but do have an additional domain name of www.uk-cs.co.uk as its easier to remember & spell. That's all. It all seems very "Cloak & Dagger" to me.

A final point. As James Kimball is in jail, it seems that the GHI/MRI is being run by Dr Ward Dean. Unfortunately it seems he's also in jail on tax evasion charges! See http://www.warddeanmd.com/.

My opinion is that these sites are actually dangerous. The fact that two of the main people associated with MSP seem to be in jail is perhaps an indicator of the true nature of the product. Whoever wrote these sites seems to have little self-control and certainly didn't pass their basic chemistry GCSE or "High School" equivalent.

I will make no further comment apart from two extracts from Silvermedicine.org faq.html & mild-silver-protein.html which you can read in full if you wish.

Extracts from these two articles:-

"Mild Silver Protein has been riddled with accusations of negligent and even fraudulent advertising since its widespread use in the early 1900's. This practice has increased dramatically with the popularisation of the internet."

"What is mild silver protein?

Mild silver protein is a silver compound. It is called "protein" because the silver is bonded with organic compounds ( proteins ). Mild Silver Protein, or MSP, has been known to cause Argyria. Lab comparison we've seen show that a quality electro-colloidal silver outperforms mild silver proteins in vitro ( "in lab experiments " ) against bacteria by a wide margin with only a fraction of the concentration of actual silver.

After personally investigating a large handful of marketing companies, our reluctant conclusion is that most organizations who market MSP are unscrupulous, and purposefully mislead their customers. We only found a few companies that demonstrate any public responsibility whatsoever; indeed, these companies will only sell their products to medical professionals. Multilevel marketing is often used to perpetuate the ignorance, and we know of two cases of Argyria that have resulted in the misuse of silver proteins. We can only strongly recommend that one studies deeply before actually using silver proteins in the body. When dealing with an unknown silver substance, it is critical to know the actual amount of silver in grams/micrograms in the product ( per dose ). "

"Occassionally we receive complaints from those involved in multi-level marketing of MSP. In each case, we offer a simple, cost-effective challenge: Show us, PPM for PPM, that MSP is anywhere near as effective as quality isolated silver products, and we will change our published information. Nobody has ever met this challenge, because it is not possible to do so."

Again, I must say that I have not tried or tested their product but I will be asking the CSQA to evaluate it. My comments are limited to the information supplied on the web sites only.