You are always hearing about viruses or bacteria that become resistant to anti-viral or anti-bacterial drugs. You don’t hear about them becoming resistant to bleach.
Couple of questions:
Bleach is a great idea! You want your dose of bleach in pill or shot form?
Seriously, finding methods to kill pathogens without killing the host has been the goal of physicians for a long time. We thought antibiotics were the "magic bullet’ and we could move away from things like mercury and arsenic which could sometimes be used to kill off the pathogen while only nearly killing the person with the disease.
Bleach, alcohol, and fire are pretty good at killing bacteria by purely physical destructive methods, so it’s unlikely anything will develop immunity. Just as people tend to not develop immunity to having a 20 ton safe dropped on them.
Drugs that can’t be overcome by resistance is sort of the current Holy Grail of infectious disease, but it’s difficult to think of a drug mechanism that can’t be overcome somehow.
Cleaners, including bleach, are not 100% effective, so the bacteria that are left behind are either resistant to being killed by such disinfectants or lucky.
If they are resistant, and more and more resistant bacteria and viruses reproduce, then it becomes harder to clean them. And, quite frankly, the first line of defense has failed, and you are left with the next line of defense, your immune system.
So, to me, we are heading down a path where the initial line of defense, disinfectants, is potentially speeding up their (germs) evolution, and the second line of defense – the body – is doing the same, care of antibiotics and anti-virals.
.
I was not suggesting that bleach is a replacement for antibiotic/antiviral medications. I just want to know why are bugs so easily able to become resistant to drugs, and not to bleach/alchohol? You hinted that they kill them differently, but I am not quite clear on that.
So you are implying it is nearly impossible to kill bacteria/virus in a way that bleach/alcohol kills that will not harm the host.
So, you are saying that bacteria/viruses ARE becoming resistant to bleach?
Bleach and alcohol kill bacteria by making their environment’s pH too basic to support cellular life. When their environment is our own cells, this approach is not possible. Antibiotic drugs need to be selective.
In order for drugs to be useful they have to be something that won’t kill the patient. So drugs, by definition, are something which one biological entity can survive. And if one biological entity can survive the drugs then it’s very close to being something that other biological entities, like the germs, can evolve to survive.
Bleach and alcohol kill bacteria in much the same way that fire and water and being crushed by rocks kill us. It makes their entire environment too toxic for them to retain any cellular integrity. Bleach denatures a lot of critical proteins.
Those few who develop ‘armor’ tend to lose their ability to cause disease as a result.
I’m posting on the fly and lack the time to be as articulate as I’d like to be on the topic.
Drugs normally target on particular essential step in the metabolism of bacteria that does not exist in the metabolism of our own cells, therefore they are much more toxic to the pathogens than for humans. A single point mutation of the enzyme targeted by the drug can produce resistance.
Disinfectants mess up everything, the only way a bacterium can protect itself is by developing such heavy shielding that the disinfectant cannot reach it, which is much more difficult.
To some degree the body already uses some of those techniques and a fair amount of research is focused on understanding how to utilize them better. These non-specific immunologic mechanisms are referred to as innate immunity. But yes, the simple answer is that what makes those methods (bleach, etc.) is that they are nonspecific and can kill host as well as invader. Once you have specificity you have the ability to select for a resistance mechanism as well.