Theres an astronomical figure of A Streptococcus bacteria on the human skin, and the same bacteria is responsible for most necrotizing fasciitis. But yet the disease is rare. So flesh eating bacteria is already thriving all over the world, it’s just that infecting human tissue isn’t trivial for bacteria

Sounds like a variant on the 12 monkeys theme.

Usually there’s a limited amount of genetic material to leverage.

If a bacteria adapts to eating plastic, you’d expect the rest to start degrading as it becomes unnecessary, and can be recycled to better plastic eating.

Organisms, especially bacteria tend to specialize, so evolution towards optimized plastic eating usually means evolution away from flesh eating.

This is how the first vaccine was invented (and why we call them vaccines).

>the doctor took pus from the cowpox lesions on a milkmaid’s hands and introduced that fluid into a cut he made in the arm of an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps.

Cowpox was sufficiently evolved away from humans and towards cows that it was easy for the human immune system to fight, and provides antibody protection against the much more dangerous smallpox.

finally, time to build the caves of steel!