Solubility of Silver Sulfadiazine in Physiological Media and Relevance to Treatment of Thermal Burns with

Silver suffadiazine cream has been a standard treatment for burns over the past two decades. Although many studies have described the phenomenon of silver absorp-tion from burn wounds treated with silver sulfadiazine, they failed to examine the chemistry underlying the ab-sorption process: Silver chloride was assumed to form at the burn wound and absorption of silver was believed to be negligible. Here we have developed chemical model systems to investigate the interactionsof silver sulfadiaz-me and silver chloride in direct contact with synthetic serum electrolyte solution (SSES), with SSES plus en-dogenous ligands or beef blood plasma, and with human serum. The results indicate that silver absorptionfrom an acute burn site can be significant, because human serum is capable of solubilizing silver. This finding is of concern