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?
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Antibiotics are like specially trained ninja assassins.
They’re good at what they’re trained to do, such as “using shuriken, take out anyone in a red shirt”. Maybe one baddie in the group has a more rust-colored shirt and the ninja assassins don’t get him. Or maybe a few have extra armor on their chests and the shuriken don’t quite take them down. The next generation of baddies may have extra padding or rust-colored shirts, so the training doesn’t work as well.
Other mechanisms that don’t lead to resistance are that way because they are more brutal, less specific.
Heat will kill anything. Oxidation will kill anything. Red shirt, blue shirt, tank, whatever. Heat will kill bad guys and good guys alike.
You don’t want to use less specific things when you need to spare living cells. For example, bleach will kill bacteria that cause ear infections, but if you put bleach in the ear (DO NOT, SERIOUSLY) you’ll damage your skin, ear drums, and all the healthy living cells too. And heat will kill MRSA but you don’t bake a wound at that temp because you’ll burn your skin off first.
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