COPPER AS ANTI-BACKERIAL AGENT IN HEATED HUMIDIFIER

[quote="Ric"]
There is however a simple solution to this dilemma:
DON'T BREATHE !
OK, let's hear it from the other team.

quote]

and OSA folks are REALLY good at THAT.
In fact we are so good at it, we can even do it in our sleep.......

Hmmm .....are we actually attempting suicide on a nightly basis?

Krousseau,
From a person completely ignorant on this topic, what is the transmission mechanism of Legionella?

TerryB

For anyone falling into the "chicken little" camp, just install one of this on the outlet of your HH and you'll be "safe"

in-line hepa filter

TerryB Legionella is an aquatic organism, grows best in stagnant water, it likes biofilm and sediment-likes specific temperatures that I forget but you could find online. Legionella also spends part of its live cycle in the ameba so tem on the list of all the bad tings that have to happen to grow them. It got its name from the fact that the first outbreak was at an American Legion Convention in a Philadelphia hotel. Particular problem then (and since) was evaporative cooling towers. It can be in improperly maintained water systems. It really likes big water systems where it is hard to clean all the surfaces. It can attach to surfaces in water or be free floating. It is harder to kill when attached to a surface. I think copper is used in some systems to retard the growth of Legionella-don't know if it kills it-maybe copper reduces the formation of biofilm. But I'm only guessing. After the L grows it has to get aerosolized so people can inhale droplets containing the organism-not the same as vapor from evaporation of water. Vaporized water is in molecular form-too small to be a carrier for bacteria, viruses, or salt.
If you are wondering about growing it in your HH. VERY unlikely unless you are SEVERELY immunocompromised. Even then it would take a lot of bad things happening all at the same time.
If you've read somewhere that an elderly man got Legionella from his CPAP-that report made no sense at all-very poor reporting. If he really did it is likely he was very immune compromised and all the bad things happened at one time.

I haven't posted the stuff I did to scare anyone or to try to get anyone to try to clean their equipment for 2 hours a day (or even 1/2 hour) Weelll.....Maybe 5 minutes. .....Kay

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CPAPopedia Keywords Contained In This Post (Click For Definition): CPAP, clean

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CPAPopedia Keywords Contained In This Post (Click For Definition): CPAP, clean

If you watch House you believe that someone can get legionella because a bottle containing a liquid culture is broken on the hospital room floor of a room where a patient who needs to catch it is in a nearby bed. I didn't believe that when House did it and I don't believe it now. While the science in House is generally better than the science in Numbers or Gray's Anatomy, it is frequently laughable. The instance when House shot a human corpse to determine whether bullet fragments from a hollow point were magnetic was more laughable than most - (1) he could have just cut the bullet up with a knife or chisel and checked the pieces of the bullet with a magnet - it is just lead and a copper jacket which can be mechanically separated (2) using less powder in a round does not always result in a lower speed bullet, there are a lot of variables but I'm more willing to forgive that one (3) he lives in New Jersey and last time I checked, it was not legal for civilians in New Jersey to posess hollow points, but you can't expect a California writer to know that.

Come to think of it, those two actions happened in the same double episode. If they could have come up with a good reason for actually dong the shooting, it would have made more sense to shoot wet paper or ballistics gel. but I just can't understand why you would not just do a mechanical disassembly of the slug.

You can get a complete copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from Dell for under $20, and you can even search it - better than Google in that there is some authority to the answers you get, better than a multi volume book in other ways - you can easily carry it. According to that source, it is believed that Legionaire's grows only slowly, can survive a year in tap water, and mostly infects those with suppressed immune systems. The way old fashioned chilled water air conditioners worked was that they had towers which the air was passed through and chilled water was dripped down rows of wooden slats which had air blown over them - the dripping separated the water mechanically, allowing a higher surface area for evaporative cooling.

The fast air flow would tend to atomize some of the water. This would have suspended whatever had been in the water into the air - including the legionella.

Before the 1930's, the rare buildings which were air conditioned all used straight evaporation. Chilled water is still used to transfer heat from freon to air because at a certain point, running air over coils ceases to be cost effective - just too many coils - so chilled water is used as an intermediate.

The place I used to work added tin to the air conditioning system to stop Legionaires from growing there - and that tin vapor, in amazingly small quantities attacked some plastic parts in the mainframe hard drives for the huge computers we then had, causing those plastic parts to get, well, gummy, and then the gum got between the hard drives and their heads and the hard drives failed. This was many years ago, when a hard drive failure cost thousands of dollars just for the replacement part, and we were having tens of failures per month in our DASD farm while a typical installation of our size would have less than one failure per year. The tin passed right through the HEPA filters and combined with plastic in the cooling air ducting in the "clean" part of the drive.

But as far as the AC systems and Legionella pneumophilia go, there is mechanical division of the water into tiny droplets - so as to use evaporation to cool the air and to transfer heat from the air to the chilled water - and the bacteria are probably in the droplets that are broken away from the water.

This sort of mechanical action simply does not happen in heated humidifiers, right? No sprays of water, pumps, drips. Just a little heat and some wicks, right? If you put silver into a humidifier and then accidentally you allowed the humidifier to dry, the residual silver might dry to a powder and become suspended in the air, and then again, the huge colonies of bacteria growing there could do the same thing, not that it would matter much, I suspect.

I would have guessed that there was no way colloidal silver could have passed from a heated humidifier into your lungs - I would have guessed, by the definition that it would be a either a finely dissolved metal particle, which is probably dissolved in the water by the inherent (very small amount of) free hydrogen in the water, or a silver compound to start with - perhaps an almost insoluble one like silver chloride. Neither of these could probably have made it into the air in a humidifier. Then again, I would have guessed that there was no way that enough tin could have evaporated from the solution used to treat the air conditioners to affect the plastic in the hard drives. I still believe (with no experimental basis) that the tin got into the air because of the mechanical action of the water heat exchanger.

http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRel ... verad.html has a photograph of the skin color change caused by ingestion of silver. One thing I find interesting is that many people who are having problems are using home made colloidal silver.

I originally looked up colloidal silver to try and determine what, if any, formal definition for colloidal silver existed. There seems to be none - in fact, it is clear that some of the people who were self treating had used an electrical current and metallic silver, which would have dissolved silver in the water as opposed to making a colloid, I think. They might have also dissolved a lot of silver into the water by doing this - much more than they might have guessed.

Hmmm. A coulomb is 6.24e18. An amp is a coulomb per second of electrons. A mole is 6.02e23 - and it is likely to take about one electron to free one atom (maybe two - but I think that silver chloride, a common silver compound, is a single charge sort of salt). Silver weighs about 108 grams per mole. So, let's presume that someone is running DC through a water solution - how much silver would come into solution at one amp? About a milligram per second - and if you had a liter of solution, you would mobilize 5 milligrams, enough to make a 5 ppm solution, in just a few seconds. The people who were using these home made systems might have been running large currents through the water for long periods - freeing way more silver than they might have realized.

Arguably, that is not colloidal silver. I don't think it matters, though. Once silver hits the acids in your body it is likely to recombine with things in your body.

I found references to colloidal preparations from 5 parts per million (ppm) to 100 ppm, and others who were selling colloidal silver at 5 ppm who were calling the 100 ppm folks diamond studded liars.

If I have done my math right, a tablespoon of a 5 ppm solution contains about 0.0002 grams of silver - not a whole lot. (0.2 mg) based on molar proportions. (Redoing the calculation by weight gives me 0.075mg and I think that the common definition is by weight, so I will be using that definition from here on in.)

According to http://www.inspect-ny.com/water/levels.htm, New York State allows 0.05 mg/L of silver in drinking water, in any form.

The question is, given that the ratio is .05 milligrams per 1000 grams of water, how many parts per million is that? The formula I found is

(x ppm)/1000000 = dissolved /solvent

So - we are solving this for ppm - and that means
xppm = (dissolved/solvent)*1000000

you have to make sure that you express both the dissolved and solvent in the same unit - we will convert them both to milligrams. A liter of water weighs 1000 grams, or 1000*1000 milligrams - 1,000,000 milligrams. Thus, the formula resolves to:

X ppm = (mg dissolved material/1000000mg water per liter)/1000000 -

the one million factors cancel and we get:

X ppm = X mg dissolved material per liter

So the number of milligrams per liter is the ppm.

So, 5ppm is 5 milligrams of silver per liter. If you are interested, silver is about 15 bucks an ounce right now, so maybe, what $0.0005/milligram? In their words, there is a penny's worth of silver in five liters of 5ppm silverwater. That explains why it costs $30/ounce.

Say you drink a tablespoon of 5ppm silverwater. That is equivalent to 100 tablespoons of 0.05 ppm (or mg/l) silverwater. 100 tablespoons is 1500 ml is two modern wine bottles full of water, a bit over six eight ounce glasses, a quart and a half or so. Less than the eight glasses that we are told to drink.

In other words, the 5 ppm silverwater may be harmlessly ineffective - sort of like homeopathy - the real damage it does is to stop people from getting effective treatment and transfers money from your pocket to the quacks.

The risk may be with people who use the stronger solutions - and who make solutions themselves, not knowing that there is danger from large quantities of silver.

I found this site to be one of the most amusing I read while perusing the silver colloid scam: http://www.silver-colloids.com/Reports/reports.html. They constantly warn you to "beware of pseudo science" as they spit forth a stream of the same.[/i]

Sorry:Years ago I worked in a top Gov't lab. Analyzed water: ocean, river, drinking, etc and air also.

I clean - I've seen all the "suppossed to be's" Tom is right on how it is supposed to be but sometimes mother nature deviates from the expected path and we are vulnerable so I suppose it really comes down to degree of probability and not practicing hygiene only increases the probabilities againstr you.

Tom (other Tom)