The Purell Generation Goes to College

Last week, as they have each August since 1998, Wisconsin’s Beloit College released the Beloit College Mindset List, a compilation of facts about this fall’s freshman class designed to let the geezer professors who have to deal with them know exactly what they’re up against.

The 2006 Mindset List explains, for example, that the Class of 2010, predominantly born in 1988, has known only one Germany, grown up in minivans, and never had to differentiate between the St. Louis baseball Cardinals and the St. Louis football Cardinals.

But the 75-item list, now making its annual email-forward rounds, omits a significant cultural touchstone in the lives of these freshmen:  throughout their lifetimes, there has always been Purell.

Introduced by GOJO in 1988, the “Instant Hand Sanitizer” was originally aimed at the food service and health care markets.  Purell was then launched as a consumer product in 1997, ushering in the era of obsessive parenting soon thereafter.

Since Pfizer purchased the Purell consumer business unit from GOJO in 2004, the sanitizing goo has exploded into a full line of products distributed with pharmaceutical-grade marketing muscle, including Purell Sanitizing Hand Wipes, Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer Moisture Therapy, Purell Surgical Scrub, and my personal favorite, the Purell FST Military Bottle, a drab gray Purell bottle that looks kind of like a grenade -- and which, according to a GOJO press release from January, provides “a fistful of protection in the war on germs.”

While most of us may never come across one of these sanitizing hand grenades, it’s hard to avoid Purell in its other permutations -- the cutesy Purell Pal that stands diligently on your desk at work, ready to dispense a dollop of disinfectant; the petite Purell bottle, perfectly sized for pocket or purse; or the portable Purell encased in pastel jelly wraps for attaching to backpacks, key chains, or, for the truly compulsive, belts.

It should come as no surprise, then, that antibacterial products are now turning up on school-supply shopping lists.  This fall, Staples offered customers grade-specific back-to-school lists featuring the requisite pens, pencils and paper (and for high schoolers and college students, the now-requisite USB flash drives) and variations on the sanitizing theme:  both elementary school lists recommend antibacterial hand soap and hand sanitizer wipes; the pre-K and kindergarten list adds “antibacterial instant hand sanitizer gel”; and the college list goes straight for the brand names, including both Oust Sanitizing Spray, and, of course, Purell Hand Sanitizer.

Perhaps schools are just dramatically germier now than when I was a kid -- admittedly, when I went off to elementary school in the mid-Seventies, the world was yet to be afflicted by Ebola, AIDS, West Nile, SARS, mad cow, avian flu, or, for that matter, ADD.  It was a simpler time.  But since you still can’t catch the clap from a toilet seat, I have a hard time believing that even the dirtiest, most dedicated nose-pickers in the sandbox are contracting these diseases from the monkeybars.

So then what, exactly, fuels our Purell paranoia?  Are we really that freaked about the flu?  Or (cue timpani) the common cold?

More likely, it’s marketing -- because there’s not a lot of evidence out there that the stuff even makes a difference.  Last October, the FDA’s Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Committee met to discuss whether antibacterial products are any more effective in fighting infections and diseases than regular soap.

After reading the literature, Dr. Steven Osborne concluded, “there was no link between use of any particular antiseptic and a reduction in infection rates,” and “no definitive proof of a benefit from use of hand sanitizers for handwashing compared to plain soap.”

Dr. Allison E. Aiello said, “Right now, as far as the conclusion from the research that we have available, there is a lack of evidence that antiseptic soaps provide a benefit beyond plain soap.”

In fact, Dr. Stuart B. Levy went on to suggest that all these antibacterial products may be making bacteria more resistant.  “I am not saying that there is not a place for biocides,” he said, “but what I am going to say is that I don't see that they are needed in the consumer product.”

(For the full text of the 386-page transcript of the meeting, plus the slide presentations, visit the FDA website -- it’s a scintillating read.)

In other words, caveat sanitizor.

But what about when soap and water aren’t available -- those panicked times played up in the Purell propaganda?  If you’ve got some Purell, by all means, slather it on.  But you may do just as well to rub a little spit on your hands and wipe them on your pants.