This question was brought at a dinner last week, going on memory:" Penicillin kills bacteria in the petri dish and when I take it in a pill. They use alcohol to sanitize things and your skin before giving you a shot. So, why don’t they tell you to drink when you’re sick? They’re both in your blood."
I was going to respond that maybe the type of alcohol mattered (ethanol vs isopropyl), but I got distracted by another conversation. So, is there a reason why a bottle of Jack Daniels wouldn’t work as a bottle of little pills do? Any studies on whether it does for any type of infection?
concentration levels would be a very likely reason, the stuff they put on your arm is in the 70%+ pure range. In your blood stream .5% is a lethal dose. (lethal dose is a dosage that will kill 50% of the people who take that amount)
My first guess and I’m nowhere near an expert on this is that the alcohol will kill when poured or on first contact with the infectious bacterial and once in the bloodstream will be absorbed by the body and processed before the alcoholic contents in it’s purest form can act naturally.
Antibiotics are simply poisons that work because they are more poisonous to infective agents (usually bacteria in your bloodstream) than they are to you. Alcohol in your bloodstream, in the sorts of concentrations it reaches there after drinking liquor, is more poisonous to you than it is to the bacteria.
Irrelevant. *Alcohol *kills bacteria by melting the cell membrane and then entering the bacteria and denaturing the proteins within. And yes, it will do this to human cells, too. If there’s enough of it in your body to kill bacteria in meaningful amounts, there’s enough of it in your body to kill your own cells.
Also, bacteria don’t hang out in the bloodstream much. If you have an infection and bacteria in your bloodstream, you are one sick puppy. Drinking alcohol gets it into your stomach, your blood and your liver, where it’s then broken down into other chemicals. Drinking alcohol doesn’t really get it to places where bacteria are generally hanging out causing problems.
The only occasion where I think intravenous alcohol is one of the acceptable treatments is in case of ethylene glycol (anti-freeze) poisoning in dogs and cats. There is a commercial product available (4-methylpyrazole), but before it came out, and even currently in some cases where the product is not at hand, alcohol is used (ethanol).
In that case, though, it is not used because of the bacteria killing properties, but because it competes with ethylene glycol and its byproducts. If all the enzymes that metabolize anti-freeze are instead busy metabolizing alcohol, then the downstream products of ethylene glycol (which are the truly toxic ones) are decreased/avoided, and the damage is lessened. The side effects of alcohol are minor compared to the anti-freeze (death).
I believe they still occasionally give IV ETOH in cases of DT’s when serious alcoholics quit cold turkey. At least, they did as of 12 years ago when a family friend lied on his intake form and the staff didn’t know he was a functional alcoholic. By the time he started seeing spiders on the walls, my SO went in to visit and asked the nurse when the patient’s last drink was. IV ETOH was quickly prescribed and his symptoms settled down and the restraints were able to be removed. I know benzos are what they prefer to use, though. Perhaps the patient was contra’ed for benzos for allergy or respiratory reasons.
Alcohol is a very broad-spectrum poison: Almost everything that lives will be killed by alcohol. Penicillin, by contrast, is a narrower poison: Lots of living things (including us) are almost completely unaffected by it.
Melt? I hope you mean dissolve; alcohol and lipids are both nonpolar, and like dissolves like, so alcohol can wreck havoc with cell membranes, aka lipod bilayers.
concentrated alcohol will cause cells to loose water rapidly causing much damage. it is a concentration that you don’t want in your body because it is poisonous to you. you don’t just want to kill all living cells just the infection.
Is that a true lethal dose? That’s only like 6 times the drink drive limit - a figure which has been acheived by drink drivers (albeit very rarely - note btw that the UK limit is 0.08 in blood but the figures in the article refer to the breath limit, which is 35mg an equivilant) - and I would suggest that
if the guy could still drive he was a fair bit away from death.
I am not saying you are wrong it just surprises me.
Incidentally, this MSDS cites an LD[sub]50[/sub] of ethanol at 6200 mg/kg in rats.
The varying methods of measurement, % weight/volume in solution used in posts #2 and 15, mg/kg used in the MSDS, and % weight/volume in gaseous solution used in the Daily Mail article are all not directly comparable to each other, which probably lends to the confusion.
As WhyNot points out, alcohol is an all-purpose killer. I assume it does not seriously affect you when wiped on your arm at high concentration, because it is affecting the surface layer of dead skin, not your internal anatomy. This is done to KILL any bacteria in the vincinity (which do not have a thick layer of protective dead cells).
In your body, it won’t work on the bacteria unless it is in sufficient concentration to also work on your cells.
Penicillin and other antibiotics, as I understand it, contain a chemical that interferes with the life cycle or reproductive cycle of bacteria but not that of humans - a chemical that “targets” one of the chemical processes specific to bacteria. Thus, they kill bacteria much more specifically than human tissue.
So alcohol is to sterilize the whole environment outside the human body - skin, medical tools, bandages etc. Penicillin and other antibiotics will specifically kill bacteria inside the body.
