How can people kill harmful bacteria that might live in some human foods?
1 Answer
Change the situation for the organism so it is outside its environmental range of tolerance.
This includes things like heating, pickling, exposing to radioactivity, or dehydrating.
Explanation:
Every living thing requires its environment to be within the limits of what it can survive. We as humans can freeze to death, suffocate, bleed out, be over-radiated, starve, die of thirst, or any number of other things.
Bacteria are no different. If a bacteria is moved outside of the range of tolerance for it to live, it will die.
Bacteria can be subjected to too much heat, killing it. This is why we cook food.
Bacteria can be killed by exposing it to low levels of radiation. This is done to some of our foods now.
Bacteria can be killed by weakening the cell wall. This is done with substances like penicillin, or cleaning alcohol.
Bacteria can be killed by starving it. This is done by our white blood cells as it surrounds a bacteria and doesn't allow anything in.
Bacteria can be killed by hunting it down. There are developments being made where custom viruses are being made that hunt down a specific type of bacteria to kill it.
Bacteria can be killed by removing water availability. This is why we dehydrate some foods.
Bacteria can be killed by making it too acidic. This is why we pickle cucumbers to make pickles.
Some other things include too much or too little oxygen, too much or too little light, too little sugar (or other food), too little or too much atmospheric (or underwater) pressure, and even too many predators.
