• Question: Would you want to prevent bacteria from growing or surviving?

    Asked by anon-231240 to Steven on 20 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Steven Rudder

      Steven Rudder answered on 20 Nov 2019:

      In some cases yes. There is a bacteria called Campylobacter. This bacteria can be found on chicken meat. If we don’t cook chicken properly or touch raw chicken and don’t wash our hands there is a chance Campylobacter can get into our digestive system leading to food poisoning. In this case we want to prevent this bacteria from growing and surviving on chicken during food processing so that less people get food poisoning. In bad cases people can have diarrhoea and sickness for days.

Comments

  • Photo: Clio

    Clio commented on :

    Ideally you want to do both if it’s a bad bacteria. If you don’t kill all the bacteria off you get what’s called a persister cell, which is a bacteria that exhibits tolerance rather than resistance to antibiotics. This is due to the survival of the bacteria during treatment, sometimes due to the bacteria going to sleep for a bit (entering a dormant state).