aren’t all the soaps antibacterial? How come some soaps (e.g. Dove) don’t mention anything about its antibacterial properties?
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There are basically two ways that we can kill bacteria with chemicals.
The obvious way is by introducing a chemical that physically damages the cell. High concentrations of salt or alcohol will pull all the water out of cells and kill them. Soap will dissolve cell membranes and kill them. From that perspective, all soaps are “antibacterial.”
The other way is to take advantage of “programmed cell death”. Many cells (including many bacteria) have a mechanism to self-destruct when they get the proper signal. That’s “normally” invoked when killing off some cells is beneficial to the larger community of cells. “Antibiotics” trick cells by sending those signals. The problem is that cells eventually “learn” to ignore them. (“Learn” is actually total BS here. What’s actually happening is that not all cells pay attention to the kill signal reliably and when all the other ones die out the population evolves to one that consists entirely of bacteria that ignore the kill signal. But it looks like learning at the population level)
Typically a soap labeled “anti-bacterial” will have some amount of the latter chemicals in it.
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