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
technicaly there does exist bacteria that can survive in extreme heat/salt/toxic conditions. They’re called extremophiles. so if you repeatedly attacked a culture of bacteria with heat/ethanol/salt, they eventually would indeed adapt after thousands of generations. This would probably take a very very very very long time because the genetics adaptations neccessary for this are quite large. You’re trying to transform a regular bacteria into an extremophile bacteria. its like trying to evolve a human back into a monkey.
While technically possible, the problem is….you only heat up your food one time. If you reheated your food over and over again for 1000 years (less than 100 degrees celsius), yes we would expect the bacteria to have developed some sort of heat resistance. but thats not how we cook food. We cook food once, then we eat it along with any of the surviving bacteria that may have luckily developed minor heat resistance. Then we poop that bacteria out, and that bacteria is never heated to those temperatures ever again.
however with antibiotics, this is a problem if the disease is contagious. If i get an infection and get antibiotics and spread it to you and you get antibiotics, and so on and so on…..now the same bacterial dynasty has received multiple waves of the same drug. It will eventually adapt to it and become resistant. Furthermore, antibiotics are not as destructive as heat/salt/alcohol. So its way easier to develop resistance to antibiotics because it just requires a slight change in the bacterias internal chemistry. heat/salt/alcohol obliterates bacteria and its much much more difficult to adapt to though not technically impossible. Its like the difference between adapting to being fed snake venom vs adapting to having to fight lions 1v1 (no weapons). If you fed all humans snake venom over and over again, the remaining survining humans will have developed natural anti venom. But if you make all humans fight lions 1v1……….sure theres some guy out there that miracously does it. And if that guy has alot of children, maybe one of his kids might be able to do it too. But its going to take many many generations before all humans are lion resistant and 99.9999999% will die.
Also im pretty sure 100% of bacteria will die at 100 degrees celsius at normal pressures. Theres nothing a bacteria can do to prevent being boiled and exploded.
Latest Answers