How does silver or gold kill bacteria?
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Gold doesn’t. Gold is the next best thing to biologically inactive, which means that living cells completely ignore it. That’s why gold is sometimes used to coat surgical implants. This is related to the fact that gold doesn’t rust – both are because gold is hard for other chemicals to affect.
Why silver kills bacteria isn’t actually 100% certain, but we’re pretty sure it’s because when silver gets wet, it creates certain chemicals (called silver ions) that harm the bacteria. A recent study suggests that this is because the silver ions cause some parts of the bacterial cell to work too fast, throwing the cell’s activity out of balance and causing death.
Silver is not the only metal that does this, by the way: copper is also very good at killing bacteria, and since it’s much cheaper than silver, some hospitals have started moving towards using copper for surfaces that people touch, like doorknobs.
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