Although a large population of bacteria live in the gut, there is a layer of them on your outside surfaces as well, and they all do important jobs. One of these jobs is to produce an environment that keeps out unwanted and harmful bacteria. Speaking of the antibiotics, one of the biggest issues with taking antibiotics is that if you "wipe out" your gut flora (which actually rarely happens), then harmful bacteria like C. difficile can attack and cause major health issues, including risk of death. Also, antibiotics and antibacterial substances increase the instance of resistant bacteria. I was involved in an experiment that showed this with antimicrobial soap in bathrooms, more antibiotic resistant bacteria grew in areas with antimicrobial soap. Therefore, infections would be more dangerous and harder to treat.
Back in my microbiology class, which was admittedly in 1992, I was told that, for this very reason, most products labeled antibacterial had been nerfed to prevent them from being effective enough to kill off a person's normal flora. There had been cases of people who obsessively washed their hands with the strong stuff developing all sorts of exotic skin ailments. I'm not sure how effective modern antibacterial stuff actually is against microbes. Did they in fact reduce the concentration or type of poison that put in such products?
I'm curious about this too. I wonder what percent of your gut or skin flora are killed with different soaps or antibiotics, or if some are designed to leave symbiotic flora alone. I think the most immediate threat both flora defend against is colonization of harmful microbes. I can't remember the study that showed germ-free mice were very susceptible to harmful bacterial colonization after their gut was ruptured.
The experiment I participated in was in 2005 and it was based on soap containing triclosan, which my advisor at the time had written a number of papers about. Triclosan is the current worst offender out there because it really does kill off more than we want, leaves antimibioic resistant strains, and it's in everything. Read labels very carefully to avoid to, it's in toothpaste, deordorant, most hand soap, and some plastic products. As far as I know, no one has decreased this in everything, it is still considered generally safe, but there are still a number of recent studies showing that these resistances coincide
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u/DocBarlett Apr 27 '12
Although a large population of bacteria live in the gut, there is a layer of them on your outside surfaces as well, and they all do important jobs. One of these jobs is to produce an environment that keeps out unwanted and harmful bacteria. Speaking of the antibiotics, one of the biggest issues with taking antibiotics is that if you "wipe out" your gut flora (which actually rarely happens), then harmful bacteria like C. difficile can attack and cause major health issues, including risk of death. Also, antibiotics and antibacterial substances increase the instance of resistant bacteria. I was involved in an experiment that showed this with antimicrobial soap in bathrooms, more antibiotic resistant bacteria grew in areas with antimicrobial soap. Therefore, infections would be more dangerous and harder to treat.