What do antibiotics do exactly and why do people grow resistant to them?
In: Biology
People don’t get resistant to them. The bacteria these chemicals target do. Ideally an antibiotic won’t interact with the person at all. The bacteria becomes resistant because some small number are just naturally resistant and will live. They then go on to repopulate with this immunity now in the population. This is because they have a small difference in what the antibiotic targets (cell wall, reproduction cycle, metabolism process, or whatever it happens to be) so that the antibiotic can’t interact with the systems it was designed to. Think about it like a key and lock. You change out a single pin on the lock and the key fails to work anymore even when the lock itself works perfectly fine still. You now need to make a new key to open the lock or in this case kill the microbe.
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