If I understand correctly, this is one of those laws-of-exponents things that humans tend to have bad intuition for, right?
Bacteria growth, unchecked, is exponential. The only reason we stay a coherent organism at all in this crazy world of trillions of other organisms is that our immune system checks the hell out of bacteria growth.
... but when that's no longer possible, when the body goes from being a hostile growth environment to food... enterococcus faecalis has a doubling time of 18 minutes. One such cell, with completely-unchecked reproduction, would produce a number of itself to rival the cell-count of the entire body in only 10 hours, and it takes way less than 30 trillion enterococcus to kill a person.
Bacteria growth, unchecked, is exponential. The only reason we stay a coherent organism at all in this crazy world of trillions of other organisms is that our immune system checks the hell out of bacteria growth.
... but when that's no longer possible, when the body goes from being a hostile growth environment to food... enterococcus faecalis has a doubling time of 18 minutes. One such cell, with completely-unchecked reproduction, would produce a number of itself to rival the cell-count of the entire body in only 10 hours, and it takes way less than 30 trillion enterococcus to kill a person.