system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
We know that misuse of antibiotics has lead to a rise in drug resistant bacteria. Have similar connections been made between the use of (1) alcohol-based hand sanitizer or (2) neosporin and other antibacterial ointments?
gpt
The good news is that alcohol resistance is way harder than, say, penicillin resistance. Penicillin binds a certain protein in order to disrupt bacterial cell walls. If you change that one protein, you're resistant. This is an easy enough adaptation that a lot of bacteria have been resistant for many years. (Still works great on syphilis, though.)

Alcohol, on the other hand, changes the configuration of all kinds of proteins and dissolves cell membranes. It's a much more aggressive and non-specific attack; if antibiotics are poison, alcohol is like a flamethrower. The only bacteria that can resist it are the ones that have always known how to form spores for defense, like those in the genus Clostridium (causes of tetanus and C diff diarrhea) or the genus Bacillus (anthrax, botulism.) Because spore-forming is such a huge and fundamental change, it's much less likely to happen in other species of bacteria.

Topical antibiotics aren't as worrying as oral or injected drugs because they don't touch nearly as many bacteria, but resistant bacteria have indeed been observed in topical treatment of acne.