To: banco$ who wrote (2131 ) 9/10/1999 12:41:00 PM From: long-gone Respond to
SILVER Nature's Purifier.The value of silver in medicine, and as a purifier has beenacknowledged for centuries. Egyptians implantes silverplates into skulls, with surgery. In ancient Greece andRome, people used silver containers to keep liquids fresh.When settlers moved across the American West, they wouldpurify a container of water by putting a silver dollar init overnight, and silver dollars were used to keep milkfrom spoiling.Toward the end of the 19th Century, other medical uses for silver were developed, including the use of silver and mer-cury in the filling of cavities, and dropping a silver nit-rate solution into the eyes of new-born babies to preventblindness due to infection.Scores of independent tests by many methods in 6 countrieshave shown that silver promptly kills bacteria in water andmaintains water purity over long periods of time. Russian scient-ists, working on water recycling and purification problemsfor the Soviet space program have decided on silver as thebest long-term sanitizing agent. Researching the problemsof water storage over periods of several months, as wellas purification for immediate use, they determined thationized silver provides the safest and longest lastingmethod of transforming polluted waste into potable water.After testing 23 methods of purifying water, NASA has chosensilver as the purifying agent on the Space Shuttle Program.Silver will be used in two functions that will provideShuttle crews with pure water for drinking, air condition-ing, food preparation and other operations. Water wasteswill be recycled in Shuttle flights and silver's first jobwill be to treat hydrogen-saturated water coming from theShuttle fuel cells: this water will pass through a tubulardevice of palladium and silver alloy. From the silver-palladium tubes water will flow to a purifying unit wheresilver will eliminate bacteria, including Pseudomonas Aand type IIIA bacteria, NASA scientists report. By establ-ishing 100 parts of silver in a billion parts of water ashygenic for drinking in the Shuttle, NASA eliminates the need for 1,000 to 1,500 parts per billion of chlorinegenerally used for purification.The unit will provide Shuttle crews with 32 gallons ofpure water daily for all uses within the Shuttle, andfor backpacks when the Astronauts work outside the veh-icle in Space. Compared to earlier prototypes, the newunit weighs 90% less, needs only one third the space,doubles the production of water and simplifies the proc-ess: it eliminates the need for mixing, metering and test-ing water while in flight and eliminates the risk of cor-rosion.The most dramatic purification tests occured in 1976 in a20,000 gallon swimming pool in Nebraska. There was no dis-infectant of any kind in the water. Fifty gallons of mun-icipal sewage plant effluent was put in the pool. Thatproduced a dangerous concentration of 7,000 E. Coli bac-teria cells per 100 milliliters (half a cup) of water.Contents of the pool were pumped through a tank con-taining alternating anodic and cathodic silver electrodesfor disinfection. Within three hours the pool was entirelyfree of E. Coli bacteria and the water contained only 3.2parts of silver per billion parts of water.The Allegeny County Health Department in Pennsylvaniaconducted tests in a 152,000 gallon pool which previouslyhas been disinfected by a 50 pounds-per-day chlorinator.The system was replaced by a silver system for the swim-ming seasons of 1974 and 1975. Pool water circulated thr-ough a filter of activated carbon impregnated with metal-lic silver. The county Health Department took up to 50 daily samples and found that silver ions remained inthe pool at a low, steady rate of 20 parts per billionwith water free of coliform, pseudomonas and staphylococcusbacteria through-out the two seasons. In contrast, 65water samples from 30 other pools having a mean concen-tration of 700 parts per billion of available chlorinefor disinfecting, showed a mean of 1.3 pseudomonas and7.3 staph. cells per milliliter of water."This data", the Health Department reported, "indicates thatsilver is equal to chlorine in maintaining essentiallycoliform free pool water, and is somewhat better than chlorine in destroying pseudomonas and staph. aureus org-anisms ....." It should be noted that there were no visiblegrowths of algae during the tests.escape.ca
