If you cut a piece of soap off with a dirty knife (say salmonella), what happens to that piece of soap? Is it infected or neutralized?
In: Biology
That depends. Is it anti-bacterial soap?
Soap doesn’t neutralize bacteria, it latches on to it, then gets washed off.
It basically drags the germs off your hand.
The soap is still just soap. In this case it’s probably best to think of both the knife and soap surface as respective environments.
So the salmonella is hanging out on a knife edge which I guess is something like being in the middle of the wilderness. It’s not ideal because without food and water you’re going to die but you can also hang out here for a few days and survive ok.
Hanging out on the soap however is more like hanging out in a toxic waste land. Touching anything will kill the salmonella almost instantly.
In both of these cases the salmonella never actually changed or impacted its environment.
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