BBC Focus Magazine

[Thinker]

What prompted this question is a label on hand sanitiser saying it kills 99.999% of germs, so I'm trying to work out how many germs there are out there and how many it can't kill!

[Shadowwolf]

Probably some extremophiles, as for how many are out there, uhhhh lots.

[M Paul Lloyd]

According to my medical source (Mrs.MPL) when considering bacteria the majority are made up of four main 'Gram' comprised of positive cocci, negative cocci, positive bacilli and negative bacilli-types and these are categorised by the type of cell wall they have and their overall shape.
The three other types are pirochaetes, which has three distinct species of its own, treponema, leptospira and borrelia all of which cause a number of diseases.
Then rickettsia that is often responsible for typhus but can only survive inside a host cell.
And mycoplasma which have no cell wall which can cause pneumonia.

But then you have all the viruses that constantly mutate, fungal spores and a variety of tiny invertebrate creatures such as protozoa.


As Mr.S so eloquently puts it "lots".... ?

[Thinker]

So I guess what you are trying to tell me is that there are "lots" of germs?

[M Paul Lloyd]

Only as a sort of rough guide though.

Thing is you could track down every single form of pathogen and catalogue them all one by one only to find that whilst you have been doing so, something else has come along.
So the likes of Bleach (which destroys anything organic) might well kill 100% of the germs on any one occasion but it's that tiny 0.001% that you cannot allow for which might just survive and, well, think of the litigation that could ensue from that happening?
So they play safe and make the 99.9999999 (or whatever) percentage up just to cover themselves.

[The Beige Avenger]

I recall one version of their marketing was "Kills all known germs, dead."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxD9PN1ZRE

It's an advert... but I promise I have no vested interest in Domestos.