Faced by a health dilemma, mother of four Sophie Westlake created her own household disinfectant that’s proven to kill COVID, to safeguard her husband from the virus. The disinfectant has proved so effective she’s taken it to market and it now has TGA approval.
Sophie’s husband Steve has Myasthenia Gravis, an illness that is similar to Multiple Sclerosis. After the removal of several lymph nodes in his chest. Steve was left with a compromised immune system for life. Just last year the 53-year-old was in hospital nine times with a serious infection.
“It’s difficult to diagnose. Most doctors don’t understand the condition. One day he collapsed and stopped breathing and there was a visiting doctor who was familiar with the condition. He ran some tests and he was diagnosed.” Sophie said.
“He’s just got to manage his physicality, and obviously he’s prone to infections a lot more than everybody else, so we took the pandemic very seriously.”
Safeguarding her family’s health
Concerned with how COVID19 could impact his health Sophie said she was eagerly waiting for someone to create a cleaning product to defend her husband from the coronavirus, but no one did and as a result she used her science background to create one herself.
“So I just started to research what could kill and envelop a virus and then started to find out about the process here in Australia to get the product tested and then approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration.”
It took Sophie about six months of working around the clock with an international laboratory to ensure Virosol+ killed Covid-19 and 99.9% of germs.
First to get TGA approval
“They follow a very vigorous TGA protocol of testing. They use a ‘surrogate’ for COVID to test on it, and over a period of months it was proven that our product killed COVID.” she said.
Sales of Virosol+ continue to rise even though there are low cases of coronavirus in Australia.
The product won’t damage surfaces in the kitchen and adds nice shine to stainless steel.
“COVID isn’t going to go away, and the fact that we have this product made available, it can be used not just now for killing COVID but in the future as another life of defence against germs,” the mother of four said.
“We did everything we could to make sure everything was made here in Australia, the bottle was made here in Australia, the labels are made here in Australia,” she said.
Sophie’s 3 tips for starting a business from scratch
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It’s important to believe in yourself and what service you’re providing.
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You have to be flexible and willing to wear every ‘hat’ i.e. marketing, accounting and product development.
- Nothing happens overnight, you need lots of patience, perseverance and the ability to never give up.
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