FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The Silver Safety Committee this week announced its creation of the Silver Safety Pyramid, which is designed to enable anyone to easily determine safe usage levels of any dietary supplement containing silver, typically referred to as ionic silver or colloidal silver. The Silver Safety Committee consists of doctors, chemistry professors and world leaders in health-freedom advocacy. This information addresses an area of interest to thousands of people who take silver supplements for health purposes, an interest which has been largely fueled by the high-profile case of a man who turned his skin blue by consuming massive quantities of home-made colloidal silver on a daily basis for years.
According to Herbert Slavin, M.D., director of the Institute of Advanced Medicine in Lauderhill, Florida, and a member of the Committee, “This is an area where confusion and concern developed needlessly. Few things in life are as cut-and-dried as the fact that silver is completely safe when used within normal limits. The U.S. government provides a very clear guideline for the safe oral intake of silver. We’ve simply provided an easy method for applying that guideline to the safe use of any silver supplement product.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a guideline called the Reference Dose (RfD) for safe limits on daily intake of silver. The EPA’s RfD guideline is specifically intended to keep a person’s intake of silver below the level that could possibly discolor the skin. The EPA emphasizes that one would have to consume much more silver than that before one would approach the levels at which any actual adverse health effects could occur.
“Anything in excess has consequences,” said Jeffrey Blumer, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Drug Research, the world’s largest clinical research center for pediatric drugs, and former director of the Greater Cleveland Poison Control Center. “Common substances like table salt and aspirin are harmless with normal use, but excessive intake can become toxic and even life-threatening. With normal responsible usage, silver supplements are entirely harmless to humans.”
The Silver Safety Pyramid is based on the Committee’s Silver Safety Guideline, which recommends that a person’s intake of silver from dietary supplements be limited to 25 percent of the EPA’s recommended limit for total daily intake of silver.
It utilizes the Silver Safety Calculation, a simple mathematical formula that enables a person to easily determine how much to take of any silver-containing product to remain within the safety guidelines.
The EPA RfD guideline is expressed in terms of micrograms of silver. Virtually all silver supplements, on the other hand, are labeled in terms of parts per million (ppm), which is the concentration of silver in the water, not micrograms.
With the Silver Safety Calculation, you just plug in your pounds of body weight and the ppm of silver in whatever silver supplement you’re using, and it calculates the appropriate limits for you.
“The EPA guideline was challenging for people to use as a guide for silver supplements,” said Committee member Donald Baird, Ph.D., professor of chemistry at Nova Southeastern University and former director of the Department of Chemistry at Florida Atlantic University. “We provided the Silver Safety Pyramid to make it very easy.”
The Silver Safety Calculation is simple enough: 12 times pounds divided by ppm equals drops per day.
The Silver Safety Pyramid provides guidelines for determining safe usage limits from three perspectives:
* Daily use
* Short-term use
* Entire lifetime
“This is useful information for everyone interested in using silver for health,” Dr. Baird added. “If people follow these guidelines, they can use silver supplements while remaining fully confident they are not exposing themselves to any risks whatsoever.”
The Committee’s website includes the Silver Safety Auto-Calculator, which automatically performs the math in the Silver Safety Pyramid for you.
The site also has an Education and FAQ section, which helps clarify the meanings of terms like ppm, ionic silver, colloidal silver, and more.
The website is http://www.silversafety.org/
Send2Press(R) is the originating wire service for this story, Copr. 2009.
[tags]Silver Safety Pyramid, ionic colloidal silver[/tags]
