Can Silver Be Scientifically Harmful to Werewolves?

[Edge Crusnik]

I'm writing a book but my chemical knowledge is near non-existent and I need a TRUE scientific reason as to why warewolves would be 'allergic' to silver. I know I could make something up but I would like to have as much fact as I can when it comes to stuff like this. It'll help me stand out.

 

[pzona]

I'm not quite sure how to go about answering this, as werewolves aren't real. My guess would be to look up human silver allergies (which are in fact real), do some research on this, and assume that werewolves have an increased allergy due to increased factors related to real silver allergies. Maybe someone else can give a better answer, but this is probably a good place to start.

P.S. You may want to try posting this in the biology section, I'm sure someone there can tell you a little more about silver allergies.

 

[rplatter]

Since werewolves are fictional, you can have any reason for silver to be poisonous to them.
It doesn't have to be an alergy.

Depending on the nature of, or cause of, werewolveism (Not sure that's a word) different reasons could be valid.

It could be that werewolves are caused by an infection of some type and that silver acts as a poison to the infection. In this case, the healing nature of the infection would be blocked by any wound caused by a silver item. Burns and such could also happen on touch as the infection dies on contact.

This might make new werewolves less susceptible to silver as the infection may not have fully reallized.

Why an infection would change behavior I don't know.
However there are many cases of this happening.
The disease that causes Cat Scratch Fever, an intracellular bacterium, has part of it's life cycle in mice, and it changes the way mice respond to cats. Instead of running and hiding at cat signs, they expose themselves more.
It is also suspected in Schizophrenia.

I would sugest a disease/virus that replaces the existing cells with its own. The replacement cells fuction the same (for the most part) as the cell they replace. The Cells would actually be individual organizms working as a team rather than part of a whole and would be closer to a stem cell than a speciallized cell. Changing shape would be a result of them converting to a new fuction and repairing damage would just be a matter of the cells filling in a void. This would also account for vampires as a differing variation to the same disease, but with much less structured cells. (Which may account for the need for blood as digestive structures and organs might be ignored) A vampire in this case would basically be a bag of jelly with a shape that looks human rather than having a human type body.
Morphing into different shapes would be fairly easy at that point.
And for both, the 'brain' part of the organizm would be spread throughout the entire body. A function of the mass rather than a specific location. The conversion of human to one of these creatures would cause the human thought pattern to overlay that as the human mind would be more focused and driven than a group of cells.
The werewolf infection could be more virilent than the vampire infection with the vampire infection requiring a depletion of the immune system before taking hold. (An almost death or repeated infection)

Another mechanism silver could have is a disruption of the communications between the cells in a creature like this. Preventing them from working together and possibly causing the disintegration.

A partial infection or young/new werewolf would possibly still have enough human parts to look human on death and enough infection parts to die at exposure to silver.

This is an interesting theme and I am enjoying playing with it.


I saw an article on