Why is someone considered no longer contagious after a few days on antibiotics?
In: Biology
Because the infection is nearly entirely gone. The rest of the antibiotics are to ensure total eradication to prevent the creation of antibacterial resistant strains.
Slowly increasing concentration of antibiotics (by for example only running a few days of antibiotics and then needing treatment again) massively increases the likelihood of a resistant strain- repeat for a few cycles (possibly in different people if infected) and you have a whole resistant infection to that antibiotic. A full treatment makes sure it goes all the way from 0 to 100% concentration and kills the entire infection – making it much less likely a microbe could randomly mutate resistance in one go
[here](https://youtu.be/plVk4NVIUh8?si=tkadHS_SkGs-2dhW) is a Harvard video demonstrating how increasing concentration can speed up resistance. I recall an experiment like this juxtaposed against one that went straight from 0 to 1000 but haven’t been able to find- the result was that no microbe managed to evolve resistance to 1000x concentration in one go
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