Buy It And Try It: Flick A Switch To Kill Germs?

We went looking for germs and they've got them inside the Woodland Regional Lab. Microbiologist Rey Alamares says in every day life you should be concerned about what you can't see, especially when you're around other people.

"When they sneeze, guess what? You're contaminated," said Alamares.

But the 'Germ Eliminator' claims it can help by simply running an ultra-violet light over anything you want to disinfect, killing any disease in four-seconds flat.

Radiation with UV light is the same principle the lab's own disinfection equipment uses to kill any and all infectious organisms. We scrounged up some bacteria. Luckily, Rey had some e-coli and staph samples for us.

We start with the common keyboard. Two swab samples were taken and each was transferred to Petri dishes. Then, following the instructions, a half-inch away, we use our Germ Eliminator on half of the samples

"We're going to open the plates and expose for 10 seconds and incubate it for 24-48 hours and see what grows," said Alamares.

Fourty-eight hours later we returned to see the e-coli had grown. Side-by-side they did not seem to have eliminated the bacteria. The light killed the germ on the keyboards.

"When you have a small number of organisms it looks like it worked well. If you have a concentrated number of organisms you need a longer exposure to make sure it works," said Almares.

Almares recommends cleaning surfaces with bleach and lots of hand washing.

We bought it online for $34.95.