- medical equipment: handles for scalpels, syringes, operation tables... All those things we need to clean again and again.
- passage ways: doors, handles, stairs handrails, subway grab bars... All the things that propagate infections in very dense populated areas.
- research fabs: hazmat suits, protection googles, fum hood protections,... All the stuff you want to make sure don't end up cross contaminate your batch or escape.
So it's still very useful.
I hope these things are autoclaved and not just disinfected.
https://ethidelabs.com/depyrogenation-and-sterilization-for-...
No matter how clean operating rooms are (which can vary a lot), it's never perfectly sanitized.
A cheap way to get many surfaces agent free would be a nice additional safety measure.
Sterilizing those often increases disease spread. By default, they are covered with a microbial community that can outcompete things that are human pathogens.
If you sterilize it, then you’re either leaving a coating of food (mostly dead skin cells) for pathogens to eat, or a coating of nasty poisons that strip the protective barrier off people’s skins, which undermines their ability to fight off what pathogens they do end up touching.
Probiotics can be applied to mitigate undesirable bacterial growth after sanitizing [1].
I think the main approach to prevent antibiotic resistance is coming up with a way to prevent bacteria ever coming across a low dose of the antibiotic. As long as we make sure the dose is either huge or zero, antibiotic resistance shouldn't evolve.
Unfortunately, humans aren't a well controlled lab experiment - and there will always be people taking a half-dose, or flushing the antibiotics down the drain where they get diluted and suddenly trillions of sewer bacteria get exposed to a low dose and suddenly start developing resistance.
That's not the only way. We have more ways:
* use low dose of antibiotic to kill enough bacteria to let the immune system to deal with the rest. Then ensure the subject is cured until all bacteria are killed so that none escape. Low dose might be needed because most antibiotics are actually pretty harmful and the harm is managed with low dose.
* use more than one antibiotic in combination with the idea there is very little chance bacteria will gain resistance to both of them at the same time.
* use the antibiotic only as a last resort. This is especially useful for bacterias that are not very harmful normally, but might become harmful for certain subjects (for example, immunosuppressed). If a bacteria with resistance escapes, the resistance might not be very useful advantage in outside environment where people do not need any help to fight off infection or when infection can be more routinely treated with another antibiotic.
Again, these are our current strategie
I think you're misunderstanding how resistances work.
Bacteria don't "start developing" resistance, if they survive the antibiotic at all they already had resistance by stroke of luck. The surviving, resistant bacteria will subsequently survive and outnumber the dead, not-resistant bacteria and we generally call this "developing resistance", but the resistance itself is down to a simple question of whether it was already there or not.
Resistances do not come to existence after bacteria come across an antibiotic. If resistance is there, the dosage won't matter because the resistant bacteria will survive regardless.
That’s not how evolution works. A few bacteria could be resistant to low doses. After the low dose, and a short wait, now the entire population is resistant to the low dose.
That gives them a much better starting point for mutations to the resistance gene and for crossing with bacteria that have some other complimentary resistance gene.
We don't really care which of those trillions of sewer bacteria carries the pre-existing genes that resist an anti-biotic; we care when a new strain starts becoming prevalent and decreasing the effectiveness. From our perspective, it's a new resistant strain.
The other problem is we depend on mutualistic bacteria to survive, if we kill all bacteria in our bodies we’ll die of malnutrition. And even worse sometimes the problem is those mutualistic bacteria getting out of balance, so we need to kill some while promoting an increase of others.
And those bacteria are constantly topped up from the environment, so we can live in a sterile environment our whole lives. It’s a delicate balance, we can’t just throw anti-bacterial things around without thought.
That's why antibiotics are typically followed by probiotic preparations to replenish our bodies with "good" bacteria. This is not necessarily done to prevent us from dying of malnutrition. The bigger problem is that lacking "good" bacteria, we can have "bad" bacteria take over the void, causing even more problems.
Can't. Changed it a bit for ya.
This is the zone we need to be in for any successful treatment. This is also why e.g. humans will never evolve bullet resistance.
Human cells don’t have cell walls, so it would not affect them.
But there are also bacteria without cell walls.
On the contrary. Animal cells do not have cell walls. They have cell membranes but that's a different thing. Many existing antibiotics interfere with the cell walls of bacteria.
The problem is we want to kill them, while in human body, without causing too much detriment to the host.
To do this, we essentially need to develop something that will cause serious harm to the bacteria and yet not harm human cells. This means exploiting various differences between bacteria and humans.
A polymer that kills cell walls indiscriminately is hardly an acceptable solution for a human. Yes, bacteria may not be able to gain resistance to it but also it can't ever be used on a real human because mass cell death will cause too much damage to the human.
And "solving the problem of selectivity" will cause bacteria to be able to find their resistance eventually. Because if it is possible to escape your cell wall getting disrupted because you have specific DNA -- a bacteria can gain resistance.
I am firmly of the opinion it is not possible to develop an antibiotic guaranteeing the bacteria will not be able to gain resistance to it.
Simply -- the resistance can be had as evidenced by human cells. And the genetic material is abundantly available to the bacteria -- they are pretty much surrounded by it while in our bodies. There is always going to be non-zero chance for resistance to be acquired by a cell and then spread to the offspring.