Found an old bottle of cephalexin prescribed to me and decided to research it out of boredom 🤷
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Antibiotics are for fighting certain bacterial infections not for viral infections.
Before antibiotics, bacterial infections used to kill people all the time.
The *bio* in antibiotics means *life*. Viruses are generally not thought of as *living* things. They’re little tanks of genetic material that get in and around your junk and replicate, a lot, in your cells. So using an antibiotic to try to kill it would be like trying to suffocate a rock by putting it in a vacuum. Not really going to affect it.
Antibiotics work by disrupting cellular processes that bacteria need to survive, thereby killing them. Viruses aren’t alive. They aren’t cells so they don’t have any cellular functions to disrupt and they aren’t even alive so they don’t have any biological processes to disrupt. There’s nothing that an antibiotic can do to them. You can’t starve something that doesn’t need to eat, and you can’t burn something that’s not flammable.
because antibiotics kill bacteria. Bacteria are the reason for many illnesses but there is a second way of getting sick: viruses. A little fuzzy analogy here,but I think it may work: Think of it like you going to the hardwarestore and buying insect repellent. You’ll be able to combat Moskitos,bugs, wasps and whatnot but it’ll not harm spiders, because spiders are not insects
Antibiotics tackle the differences between bacteria cells and human cells especially in regard to the bacterial cell walls, since viruses are not cells and don’t have cell walls, they are unaffected by antibiotics. https://youtu.be/04brjRdc02w
Antibiotics are poisons that act on those parts of bacteria that are different from human/animal cells. They kill the bugs but not you.
Viruses are simply different. They don’t have the same cellular machinery that bacteria do, so antibiotics don’t do anything to them. In fact viruses aren’t cells at all, and by most metrics aren’t really alive.
Antibiotics mess up bacteria’s metabolism or ability to form their cell wall. Viruses are not cells and have neither of those things, so, naturally, antibiotics don’t do anything to them.
I think your first question has been well answered already.
For your second question… yes, antibiotics expire. The reason is that they lose potency over time, which makes them less effective. While there are studies that support the position that the loss of potency is quite small, good practice is to not use any expired prescriptions.
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