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Dettol antiseptic spray says it kills coronavirus. That is correct but that doesn’t refer to the new coronavirus (Covid-19) identified in Wuhan. Coronavirus is a large category of viruses that includes the common cold. Dettol has said its products haven’t been tested against the new virus yet. Coronavirus isn’t dangerous as it can be killed by Dettol products. How dangerous the novel coronavirus is doesn’t relate to whether disinfectants work against it. Coronavirus is a large category of viruses that includes the common cold. Dettol has said its products haven’t been tested against the new virus yet. Update: This article was written before recent public comments about the use of disinfectants in combatting coronavirus. While Dettol and other disinfectant products may kill the new coronavirus on surfaces, the makers of Dettol says under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).A Facebook post shows an image claiming that Dettol spray can kill coronavirus and that it was known about in 2019. It has been shared over 10,000 times on Facebook. Another shows an image of a Dettol bottle and asks if Corona virus is so new and so dangerous how come dettol can kill it? It has been shared over 7,000 times. The implication is that the new coronavirus observed in China is not new, or that it is not very dangerous if Dettol can kill it. Both images are of genuine bottles of Dettol, as we’ve written before, and a number of Dettol products say they are proven to kill Human Coronavirus. But the key point here is that coronavirus is a broad category of viruses which includes a number of different respiratory illnesses. One is the common cold, but the category also includes SARS (the severe acute respiratory syndrome of which there were outbreaks in 2002 and 2004), and the new coronavirus identified in Wuhan. The Human coronavirus referred to on the Dettol bottle is not the same as the new one (recently named Covid-19 by the World Health Organisation.) The new coronavirus has not been tested with commercial cleaning sprays yet to see whether or not it can be killed by them. As for how dangerous the new Covid-19 virus can be, the World Health Organisation has said: As with other respiratory illnesses, infection with [Covid-19] can cause mild symptoms including a runny nose, sore throat, cough, and fever. It can be more severe for some persons and can lead to pneumonia or breathing difficulties. More rarely, the disease can be fatal. The isn’t necessarily a link between how dangerous a virus is to those infected with it, and whether disinfectants are effective against it. For example, one study in Nature suggests that Dettol is effective against Ebola, although Dettol don’t make that claim themselves. Covid-19 spreads primarily through person-to-person contact, such as respiratory droplets generated when a person, for example, coughs or sneezes—so the most common route of infection isn’t via surfaces that could be cleaned with such products. Stay informed Be first in line for the facts – get our free weekly email Subscribe Dettol has issued information about the Covid-19 coronavirus. It says the new virus is not yet available for commercial testing. It also claims that a number of its products have proven effective against other types of coronavirus. It adds: Given the structural similarities of the novel 2019-CoV virus to the coronavirus strains tested previously (SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, Human Coronavirus), and based on the evidence available to us, we would expect our Dettol products (listed above) to be effective against the new strain. Definitive scientific confirmation of this, as with all other commercially available virucides, can only be provided once testing against 2019-nCoV Coronavirus has been conducted, following release of the strain by relevant health authorities. Update 24 April 2020 Update: This article was written before recent public comments about the use of disinfectants in combatting coronavirus. While Dettol and other disinfectant products may kill the new coronavirus on surfaces, the makers of Dettol says under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route). This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because although the Dettol spray does mention coronavirus, that’s a whole family of respiratory viruses, including the common cold, as well as this new coronavirus virus from Wuhan. We also can’t yet know if products like Dettol are effective against the new virus as they’ve not yet been tested. The fact that coronavirus is listed on the back of Dettol products doesn’t mean the company knew about the new Wuhan coronavirus last year, as is suggested by the posts.
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