Re:Actually, disease _could_ become resistant to n (Score 2)

Sometimes I wonder if using the attack actually makes things worse by the following mechanism in addition to the above selection: Presumably, a variant organism and a "standard" organism compete for resources in an environment. Thus the standard organism keeps resources from the variant that it would otherwise have. So the standard organism actaully inhibits the spread of the variant (not to mention providing something for immune systems to cut their teeth on). Remove the standard organism, and the stronger variant has less competition....

That does not make any sense in that if you were attempting to kill an organism in the first place, you don't care whether or not it is resistant to a form of attack or not, you just want it gone. The "standard organism" is just as much of a problem as the "variant", so it doesn't matter whether or not there is selection pressure for the variants to win out. If you just let all of the organisms hang around it would be the same result as letting the variants take over the population. The person would be dead or the water would be contaminated or whatever.

It is -misuse- of a technique that is the problem. This provides unnecessary selection pressure towards the variant you can do nothing about, which is why there is a big stink about overperscription of antibiotics and what have you.