ShareThisFor the last four months, Kelly Royce has kept two bottles of hand sanitizer gel on her desk and a can of Lysol in the drawer.
She is not paranoid about germs. But the way she sees it, manning the front desk at the Florian Insurance Agency in Toledo, Ohio, carries health risks.
"I would say that lately, 90 percent of the people coming in the door are sick. After they leave, I do my hand sanitizer, and I use Lysol on the doorknob," said Royce.
She estimated that she uses sanitizer about 20 times a day and goes through half of a large bottle of the gel a month. Her goal: prevent contracting the H1N1 flu strain, or worse.
Public concern about H1N1, known as swine flu, and seasonal flu strains has prompted a huge swell in sales of hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes, disinfecting sprays, and other items to kill germs or reduce the risk of infection.
In the Toledo area, for example, Johnson and Johnson's Purell brand hand sanitizer is becoming difficult to find, and some retailers said the manufacturer is having problems supplying the product.
"When I order a dozen bottles, they're allocating quantities. So I'll get four instead of my dozen," said Michelle Coleman, manager of Kahler Pharmacy in Toledo.
"I have not yet run out, just because I've been trying to stay on top of it. What's selling the most is the pocket-size bottles," she said.
High demand for Purell nationwide prompted Johnson and Johnson to issue a statement recently:
"We acknowledge that, because of this increase in demand, consumers may currently find limited supplies. ... Our top priority is public health and we are committed to working with our suppliers to attempt to increase production ... to meet consumer demand during the remainder of 2009 and in 2010."
Sales of hand sanitizers between April and the first week of October reached $118 million, a 71 percent increase from a year earlier, according to Nielsen Co. Sales soared during September.
Spokesmen for the Walgreens drugstore chain said the sanitizers are selling well. The company this month reported that October sales increased 9 percent from a year ago, at least in part because of sales of sanitizers, disinfectant wipes, fever reducers and related products, a spokesman said.
Kroger spokesman Amy McCormick said the nation's largest supermarket chain has experienced "a significant increase" nationwide in sales of such products.
Clorox Corp. reported a 23 percent rise in profit to $157 million for its most recent fiscal quarter, ending Sept. 30, and a spokesman said the largest factor was strong sales of "disinfecting products due to H1N1 concerns."
The robust sales of those products are expected to continue this quarter, the spokesman said.
Businesses that come into close contact with children and the adults who care for them -- such as day-care centers, toy stores, jewelry stores and libraries -- have been diligent for years about using disinfectant sprays or gels.
But now about one-third of businesses have begun taking precautions against H1N1, according to a survey by workplace consultants Challenger, Gray and Christmas Inc. For many of those businesses, hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes are the new front-line weapons against illness.
For the first time, KeyBank recently began providing bottles of hand sanitizer to all of its employees, not just bank tellers who deal with money and the public.
"We've provided hand sanitizer to every KeyBank employee," said spokesman Dan Davis. "We're just trying to help everyone take extra precautions heading into flu season."
Hand sanitizers recently became a key fixture at The Source, a job agency in Lucas County, Ohio. Mike Veh, work-force development manager, said the agency purchased bottles of the gel and placed them at the entrance, in the public areas, and for use at job fairs.
"I have two bottles on my desk. One is a big bottle left over from a recent job fair and the other is a small bottle I keep right in front of my keyboard," Veh said.
Employees at The Source previously never thought much about the spread of germs throughout the building.
But now "people are much more conscious of the fact that there may have been 40 or 50 people touching a thing before you touched it," he said.
(Contact Jon Chavez at:jchavez(at)theblade.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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