Scientist Says Anti-Bacterial Wipes Are Pretty Much Useless

We've all seen the ads where someone -- usually a dunderheaded TV commercial "husband" -- puts something gross on a kitchen counter, only to have his better half save the day with an anti-bacterial wipe.

Well, a real-life researcher has wiped away that illusion with findings that Lysol wipes and their ilk only kill harmful bacteria for mere minutes, and within 20 minutes, colonies of microscopic baddies will be back.

Dr. Clare Lanyon, a biomedical scientist from Northumbria University in Newcastle, England, first broke the news after an experiment on the BBC show Trust Me I'm A Doctor.

"Some bacteria can divide every 20 minutes so it doesn't take long for one cell to become one million cells - in fact it would only take around 6.6 hours".

What's more, a scrubbing of a contaminated kitchen surface with old-fashioned bar soap was found to kill bacteria even better than the fancier anti-bacterial stuff, as the bar stuff broke down cell walls, busting them permanently.