regular_modern_girl t1_it78zd4 wrote on October 21, 2022 at 1:19 PM

Reply to comment by chunseye in Why does alcohol kill bacteria, but not the cells that our bodies are composed of? by Chairman_Mittens

https://www.sciencealert.com/how-many-bacteria-cells-outnumber-human-cells-microbiome-science/amp

It’s about 1.3:1 at most, so very slightly more, but definitely not vastly more, and again (as I’ve said three times now) irrelevant to anything I said. This article includes links to two other sources, including one noting how it’s actually nearly impossible to give a completely accurate general human number on this due to the variance between individuals. In any event, the common citation that there’s 10:1 or some other huge number (which you strongly imply in your comment) is derived from a single discredited study, and the actual number is far less impressive.

But yet again, a bacterium is a single-celled organism, a human is multicellular one. It’s pretty obvious which is going to more vulnerable to being killed by alcohol. Exactly how many individual bacteria are inside a given human body has little to nothing to do with anything I said.

chunseye t1_it79lzn wrote on October 21, 2022 at 1:23 PM

I never meant to answer OP's question, I just meant to correct your incorrect statement. Hence the quotes, then the correction. Why are you treating all this as a personal attack?

regular_modern_girl t1_it7aj91 wrote on October 21, 2022 at 1:31 PM

Where did I say anything about a personal attack? I never once said “stop personally attacking me”, or even mentioned myself at all.

I am kind of confused which “incorrect statement” you think you’re correcting, though, because I never said “there are more human cells than bacterial cells in a human body”, I never even said “bacteria make up but a small fraction of the mass or volume of the human body” (although the latter statement would be inarguably correct), I merely said that a human (as in our own cells) has a lot more cells than a single bacterium (one cell). Hundreds of trillions is clearly more than one. So I don’t entirely understand what exactly you thought you were “correcting”, because you were essentially addressing a claim that wasn’t even made (regardless of how accurate it is).