I personally think that antibiotics are an interesting case study of both modern ingenuity and, alternatively, hubris. Antibiotics are highly specific in the way that they kill bacteria, which is both their glory and their downfall. This specificity makes them very effective in deactivating whatever metabolic pathway they target but also places a selective pressure on the bacteria that allows them to quickly evolve a resistance. Thus, while antibiotics can be very effective in curing bacterial ailments, the medical community must be very careful about the prescription of antibiotics to patients to prevent the potential evolution and spread of hyper-resistant strains.
Disinfectants, on the other hand, do not pose this same threat. Heat, alcohol, ultraviolet light... these things do not target specific metabolic pathways that bacteria can evolve around. They produce environments that are highly intolerable to the bacteria to the point where they are simply obliterated, rather than just biochemically interfered with. This is extremely useful in the medical world for keeping pathogen exposure as minimal as possible without generating selective pressures on bacteria that allow for them to become something like MRSA, which is a considerable threat. A drawback to these things is that they are not so easily implemented upon the human body: you can't apply hundreds of degrees of heat to a human to rid them of bacterial infection nor use highly concentrated alcohol (although, has anyone with strep throat tried day-drinking absinthe?).
Hopefully we are able to find a way to use disinfectant-like techniques to internally fight bacterial infections so that antibiotic usage doesn't eventually create a superpowered bacteria monster that wipes out Western civilization! Marvel supervillain idea, maybe?
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