how bacteria can natural select to become resistant to antibiotics in decades but not resistant to heat (cooking), ethanol (fermentation), and/or salt after tens of thousands of years of contact w these pressures.

Question

Why is cooking still an effective way of eliminating human pathogens or fermentation or salting? These methods do not eliminate all traces of the bacteria so what is keeping a random mutation from happening that allows, say, e. Coli in beef to become resistant to heat up to 60c or Listeria to resist salt concentrations to the same levels as bacteria which are not infectious and potential beneficial to us that can tolerate?

What is it about antibiotics that makes them so susceptible to creating these random mutations that antibiotics become near obsolete in decades?

In: 24

Answer 1

You can become resistant to sickneses and poisons by exposure or simply by not dying and passing your survival genes to the next generation but you will hardly ever become resistant to falling in a volcano or an acid pool. Same with bacteria, they can survive and mutate to resist basic attacks but nothing can survive chemical or physical destruction.