Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by raverbashing 4574 days ago
Not to mention increased resistance from bacteria

And of course the needed contact with foreign agents to build immune resistance. Use antibacterial soap when needed: hospitals

1 comments

Is there any evidence for this? Generally speaking, one would expect biocide resistant bacteria to be less antibiotic resistant.
Well the problem is that a lot of antibiotic resistance can be attributed to efflux pumps that literally pump the stuff out of the bacteria. So these are generalized resistance mechanisms that target a broad array of environmental stuff that might ordinarily kill a microbe. Here's a pretty well-cited paper on the issue, though it's rather old: http://aac.asm.org/content/45/2/428.short
Biocide resistance is also a problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiseptic#Evolved_resistance

I'm not sure if there's a relation of resistance between biocides and antibiotics

I'm not a biologist, but I would assume that bactericides for external use can be much more aggressive than antibiotics that are injected in the organism; they are expected not to kill the patient altogether the bacteria.