Silver from the fridge kills salmonella

An international biotechnology company based in Boston, USA, has developed AgION technology. It’s an antimicrobial coating based on natural silver.

Refrigeration: who’s there? Microbes…

In the 1960s in Europe and later in the United States there were thousands of cases of severe infections of specific intestinal infections. Statistics have led scientists to conclude that these infections have affected then-owners of household refrigerators. Before that time it was thought that microorganisms dangerous for people were not active in cold weather and that they grew and multiplied best at human body temperature of +37 °C.

But food-borne bacteria have easily adapted to these new living conditions. Many microorganisms have learned to live at sub-zero positive temperatures, which can be found in a freezer. And the lower temperatures contribute to the selection of the most viable and therefore the most aggressive mutants. Deep freezing of foods doesn’t help either. Microbes survive deep freezing and thawing dozens of times in a row. That’s why even the industrial ice makers in the US have sounded the alarm.

Moreover, bacteria, previously considered relatively harmless, have appeared, which now multiply intensively at +4 °C refrigerator temperature, and their pathogenic power increases significantly. It was these bacteria that caused the first “refrigeration epidemic” of the ’60s. It started with Sweden and Belgium, gave a strong outbreak in France, then came to Norway, Spain, the U.S. Note that these are all developed countries, where by then more than half of the families had home refrigerators.

Changing the fridge for the cellar!

Back then, in the 1960s, there were serious appeals in France and elsewhere in Europe to move away from fridges and to go back to the grandfather’s way of storing food for a short time in the family cupboards and closets. But progress can’t be reversed. You get used to a good thing, in this case the convenience of storing food in the refrigerator.

And everything was limited by strengthening of sanitary-and-epidemiologic control over storage of food in industrial refrigerating units in warehouses and appeals to wash food thoroughly with hot water both before storing in home refrigerators and before consumption. Which, you should agree, is not always appropriate. Meat, fish, vegetables, fruits stored after washing change the taste and quality.

Since then, reports of mass food poisoning have been appearing with unfortunate regularity. At one time periodicals wrote about “microbes from the fridge”, then it all went quiet: why bother people, when there are no effective ways of protection anyway?

The only protection measure could be the plastic cleaning brush, included with fridges with integrated evaporator and there are a great majority of such today , for cleaning the hole, through which the water is removed during regular melting of frost on the internal rear wall of the fridge compartment.

What could possibly clog this hole if the frost melts and produces pure, distilled water?? Nevertheless, many of us have encountered a situation where the outlet channel gets clogged with some slime, and the melt water drains to the bottom of the refrigerator. And these are just the traces of unwanted microorganisms living in the refrigerator.

They eat, they drink, they are born, they die, and no matter how small they are, all of this will eventually form visibly mucky lumps, washed by meltwater into the canal and clogging it. We can’t see the germs living in the fridge, but how clearly they make their presence known!

Better silver ions than precious silver?

The idea of a new solution to the problem is silver. And while the idea is old, the technology is the latest. An international biotechnology company based in Boston, USA, has developed AgION technology. It’s an antimicrobial coating based on natural silver. Obeying the physical laws, silver ions are gradually released from the coating and go to the surface moisture film, where the microorganisms are.

In turbo-cooling mode in the fridge, bacteria, viruses, moulds and fungi migrate from contaminated products, settle on the walls where they die.Because AgION affects them in three different ways: it breaks the cell membrane, blocks cell respiration, binds cell DNA, which prevents the cells from multiplying. That’s the end of them.

It has been experimentally proven that AgION coating destroys such dangerous pathogens as salmonellae, staphylococcus aureus and other types of staphylococci, streptococci, tubercle bacillus, legionella and many others, not to mention various types of mold and pathogenic fungi. Testing is ongoing, and the list will be greatly expanded.

And the AgION coating itself controls the intensity of silver ions emission! It is designed so that when ambient humidity increases and bacterial growth accelerates, the amount of emitted silver ions increases accordingly. In any case, the coating is effective throughout the entire service life of the refrigerator. There is no development of resistance of bacteria to the action of silver, in contrast to the rapid emergence of resistance to antibiotics.

Great idea and its implementation is very cheap. This invisible to the eye transparent glass cover is applied to all the internal surfaces of the refrigerator before the moulding of the parts at the factory. New technology adds no more than 10 euros to a fridge.