(pleasant mallet percussion music)
- [Narrator] This warehouse usually operates
10 hours a day, four days a week
packaging and shipping industrial disinfectant products.
Right now, workers are here seven days a week
13 hours a day to keep up with demand from businesses
during the novel coronavirus outbreak.
- Disinfectants have now moved out of the clinical space
into the mainstream, and I don't see that changing
in the foreseeable future.
- [Narrator] Virox Technologies is a disinfectant company
based out of Oakville, Ontario.
They created the patented solution
Accelerated Hydrogen Peroxide, or AHP,
a disinfectant with the ability to kill viruses.
So can Virox keep up with demand
and how can their products
help fight the novel coronavirus pandemic?
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Hydrogen peroxide is active against a wide range
of microorganisms including bacteria, yeasts,
fungi, viruses, and spores.
- Naturally-speaking,
hydrogen peroxide is an unstable molecule.
That means that it likes to break down
from hydrogen peroxide to water and oxygen.
- [Narrator] Virox's AHP technology
combines hydrogen peroxide and other ingredients
which Virox claims creates an effective cleaning agent
but one that is environmentally-friendly
and safe to use on a variety of products and materials.
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As businesses around the country temporarily shutter,
Virox is producing five times more AHP products than usual.
Today, their technology is being used
in nursing homes and healthcare systems
like Northwell Health and cleaning companies
for the virus-stricken cruise ship Diamond Princess
are required to have experience with Virox products.
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- This is the area that we call where the magic happens.
That's all the innovation work,
novel synergies, novel technologies and formulation work
that leads to the production
of our antimicrobial disinfectants.
Here are some examples
of different formats of products that we have.
We have wider bucket wipes, smaller format wipes,
ready-to-use sprays, and concentrates.
This here, you see a wide-format wipe.
The size of it is larger.
It's mainly used for disinfecting surfaces
by janitary and sanitary crew.
- [Narrator] The coronavirus pandemic
has crippled the roughly $40 billion U.S. cruise industry.
The world's four biggest cruise lines
said that they were cutting short voyages
and suspending U.S. sailings for a month.
Major cruise lines are using AHP products
to disinfect their ships.
- So usually in the cruise industry,
you have the workers using reusable microfiber wipes,
and they often put 'em in a little basin
and pour our disinfectant solutions
to completely saturate them.
They'll start disinfecting from higher to reach areas
and do their disinfection
and make sure they touch all the surfaces
going from top to bottom,
and later move to lower areas like desk surfaces
and tables and railings, chairs possibly,
making sure that the disinfectant
is evenly applied on all surfaces.
- [Narrator] In early March, the EPA released a list
of products qualified for use against the novel coronavirus
including information about the amount of time
a surface has to remain wet for effective disinfection
and whether the product has demonstrated efficacy
against a harder-to-kill virus than this one.
Virox products were there alongside bleach, ethanol,
and quaternary ammonium-based disinfectants among others.
While these products have not been tested
specifically against the novel coronavirus,
the EPA has listed them as they have demonstrated
efficacy against a harder-to-kill virus
or against another similar human coronavirus
according to an EPA spokesperson.
- Our competition is not brands.
It is legacy chemistries,
chemicals that have been used for decades,
sometimes 50, 60 years that have remained unchanged.
All the while, the bugs are mutating,
but the chemicals stayed the same,
so it's not terribly difficult to disinfect a surface.
It's difficult to disinfect a surface
without hurting the surface or the person doing it
and the environment post-usage.
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- [Narrator] The cleaning and hygiene company Diversey
bought the intellectual property rights to AHP technology
from Virox in December and distributes it
to more than 28 countries around the world.
The company has seen an eight-fold increase
in orders of Virox AHP products
since the beginning of the outbreak
and it's increasing month over month.
- I mean, if you take a look at SARS from 2003
and you take a look at where we are today,
there's been a number of mini outbreaks in between there,
so you had MERS in the Middle East,
again, another virus transmitted from an animal,
and then in between there,
you've had community outbreaks of MRSA, VRE.
The infection prevention experts
call it the Bug of the Week Club.
They do not expect that this is the end.
This is just possibly the new norm.
All of this activity will make people more prepared,
more aware, and you're gonna see different procedures,
processes put in place in terms of state of readiness.
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