If most or all of the members of your household have recently dealt with a stomach bug (such as norovirus, for example), it is important to sanitise your home properly after you have all recovered so that the family members who didn't contract the virus and the people who visit your home do not get ill. Here are two ways to do this.

Arrange for a cleaner to sanitise your leather upholstery

When furniture with leather upholstery is brand new, it is relatively easy to wash and sanitise; all you have to do is wipe the material down with a leather-safe detergent and a damp cloth.

However, as leather furniture ages, it tends to develop cracks. Whilst these cracks can actually give the furniture a very nice distressed look, they also make it harder to sanitise. This is because these crevices in the leather can serve as a very effective breeding ground for any pathogens that are transferred onto the sofa by the people who sit or lie on it.

If your family members have had a stomach bug, it is very likely that the cracks in your leather-upholstered sofas and armchairs are infested with pathogens, which you may struggle to kill. In this situation, the only household cleaning products that will work will be ones made with harsh chemicals that will end up damaging the leather when they kill off the bacteria and viruses.

This is why, in this situation, you should find a cleaner who provides leather upholstery cleaning services and have them sanitise the furniture for you. They will use their expertise to assess the condition of the furniture and determine which products or tools they can safely use on it to sanitise the leather without ruining its appearance. They may decide to spot-clean the cracks in the leather with a heavy-duty steam cleaner and use their own collection of high-quality leather cleaning products to sanitise the other areas.

Use isopropyl alcohol to sanitise surfaces that are touched by people's hands

One of the reasons why stomach bugs and other viruses tend to spread so quickly is because sick people tend to transfer the pathogens on their hands to every surface they come into contact with. The healthy people who then touch these same surfaces often end up contracting whatever illness those sick people have.

To address this situation, you should wipe down all of the surfaces that people in your home tend to touch with their hands (like drawer handles, doorknobs, handles, tables and taps) with isopropyl alcohol. This chemical is routinely used by medical professionals in hospitals to sanitise surfaces and instruments, as it is known to kill almost all micro-pathogens within a few seconds of coming into contact with them.

Doing this should help to remove most, if not all, of the residual pathogens left behind on the most frequently touched surfaces around your home after you and your family have recovered from the stomach bug.