"I'm glad given the Ebola scare you're still shaking my hand," Jon Stewart greeted his Daily Show guest
Bill O'Reilly last night. Then he pushed a bottle of hand sanitizer
toward O'Reilly and told him, "Everything is going to be ok."
Stewart was poking fun at O'Reilly, who on his show The O'Reilly Factor has been freaking out about Ebola in a way that his Fox News colleague Kristen Powers told him was
"bordering on hysterical." But even if most people are not yet calling
for the head of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention to resign —
as O'Reilly has been — there does seem to be a general agreement that,
well, a few extra squirts of hand sanitizer couldn't hurt.
Sales of cleaning products have soared over the last few weeks, according to Nielsen data collected by Deutsche Bank (and reported by AdAge).
Clorox has jumped the most so far, with a 28% sales boost over last
month. General disinfectants were up nearly 13%, and hand sanitizer
sales have climbed 8%.
Lysol's Facebook page is currently overrun by people asking if its
products will help them fight the deadly, incurable virus. "Does Lysol
work on Ebola??" An Illinois woman named Stacey Henderson recently asked,
noting that the product she purchased does not mention Ebola-killing
properties on its can. "Does Lysol Spray kill the Ebola virus on hard
surfaces?" a woman named Carrie asked. "If so, how long should it remain
on the surface? Does it kill it on soft surfaces? Again, how long?" The
Clorox Facebook page is similarly overrun.
According
to both the CDC and the Association for Professionals in Infection
Control and Epidemiology, only hospital-grade, EPA-approved cleaners
should be used on areas contaminated with Ebola. Surprisingly, that
includes some household products made from companies like Lysol and
Clorox.
Lysol has updated its website
with a flashy graphic and easy-to-find information about its products'
effectiveness against Ebola. Its disinfectant sprays are EPA-approved
for hospitals. While they haven't been formally tested on Ebola, Lysol
says that "based on their ability to kill similar as well as harder to
kill viruses, these products are likely to be effective against the
Ebola virus."
Clorox isn't quite so forward with its Ebola information, although
its bleach and disinfectant wipes also meet the CDC's hospital-grade
criteria. The company has recently shipped 12,000 bottles of bleach to
infected regions in West Africa.
"Clorox, we are all looking at you. #ebola," a woman named Meg Mo
wrote on the company's Facebook page earlier today. Or as a man named
Justin Van Elsberg put it, "Help us Clorox, you're our only hope."
This article originally published at Businessweek
here
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