Computers Breeding Harmful Fungus

Soft writes: "The BBC has a story on several kinds of fungus proliferating among the dust inside computers. Not quite Dust Puppies, but hospitals are worried about the computers they use, especially in intensive care units." So besides monitor burn, eyestrain, electrical shock, carpal tunnel syndrome, short attention span and lifting-related injuries, now you can worry about Aspergillus fumigatus, too. (Or occasionally disinfect.)

Comments

breeding Bolshevism

[Jonathunder]

For those wondering what in the Heck the "the as-washrooms-are-to-bolsheviks dept." reference is about, it was a 1920's advertisement by the Scott Paper Company, warning if your company restrooms didn't have the right paper towels, you may be fostering Communism among your employees. Really.

Not surprising.

[Chas]

Something a lot of people outside the health institutions don't hear much about.

Nosocomial Infections

Basic Translation: Hospital-Acquired Infections (you get sick from stuff you didn't have before you came into the hospital).

It's really not surprising that relatively warm, dark environments like computer cases are breeding grounds for this sort of thing. Heck, you have people going into and out of infected rooms, picking stuff up, mixing it about on keyboards, touch-screens, etc. Computers are already an avenue of infection simply due to their high traffic usage.

I work on an orthopaedic/trauma/general surgery unit at my institution. You name it, we've seen it. There's so much stuff (disease-causing organisms) coming in, that most people barely notice if they pick up "a little something else".

Consequently, we spend a LOT of time making sure rooms are clean and surgical patients are kept as far as feasibly possible from infected patients.


Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!

Re:Not surprising.

[Technician]

I wonder if one of the custom case jobs could be modified just for this. Instead of fancy Neon in the case, put in a germicidal short wave UV lamp. Don't forget to add the charcoal filter over the power supply fan for the ozone.

Just a cotton-pickin' minute.

[Alik]

Aspergillus is a favorite fungus for my profs to test, because the second your immune system goes away, it just waltzes in and starts invading everything it can find. However, one of the things I recall being taught is that part of the reason we have troubles with it is that it's literally *everywhere*. I'd be willing to bet money that it was in the ICU dust beforehand, just due to all the incredibly sick patients (some of whom had invasive aspergillosis) that had come through. It's the same reason the antibiotic-resistant bugs live in hospitals --- we can't get rid of them.

Oh, and for everyone else worried about Aspergillus from their computers: quit it. Unless you've lost a seriously large chunk of your immune system to chemotherapy, AIDS, leukemia, or something similar, the worst Aspergillus can do to you is trigger your mold allergies. When something is everywhere, the body learns to deal with it.

Re:Just a cotton-pickin' minute.

[IronicCheese]

When something is everywhere, the body learns to deal with it.

Are you sure about that? I mean, MSFT is everywhere and...oh, nevermind.

Re:Just a cotton-pickin' minute.

[Alik]

You're missing my point. The fungus is *already* in the ICU. It's already being blown around by the ventilation system. Sure, you can reduce risk a little by not having your computer fans kicking dust right into the patient's face. However, blaming the machines for the presence of the fungus is just plain wrong.

Are there things on the computer keyboard? Yes. And also on the sheets. And on the equipment. And on the countertops. And being tracked in from the outside with each new patient. You can't sterilize the ICU, at least not yet. No matter what you do, any surface that isn't either fresh from the autoclave or inside a sterile wrapper is automatically contaminated. Now, maybe those antibacterial surfaces we've read about will cut this down eventually, but for now, the only solution is careful monitoring of patients.

(And for the record, yes. I'm a med student. I've never been in the ICU as a patient, but I've been there several times as staff/observer.)

Keyboard Grossness

[xx01dk]

Just reminded me of the time I was tasked with finding out why my boss's keyboard didn't work any more.

There was literally a hardened crust of fried chicken skin, hair, grease, coffee grinds (and probably coffee), cola, nail clippings, and various other unidentified biological stuff. Sounds like the perfect breeding ground for anything that likes to grow in warm, dark, sticky places.

Of course, this was the guy everyone feared because of his projectile spittle, so it was probably not unreasonable to be able to find remnants of his meals inside everything at his desk, including his computer. Glad I don't work there anymore.

The solution?

[Alien54]

I recall seeing pictures, etc of direct emmersion of running electronics in things like freon. Things like TVs, etc

If you want a very technical discussion the article here covers it nicely.

Simply put, full immersion would handle the problem because the fungus would not grow under those conditions. Of course, other factors may make this inconvenient.

OverClockers would likely find the magazine where the article comes from, Electronics Cooling, interesting to read as well.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Another solution..

[OblongPlatypus]

..would be to get a clear case for your computer, so you can at least keep an eye out and know when the fungus appears :)

Easy

[freeweed]

Open up a machine that's been running in even a slightly dusty office building for a few years, and you'll find plenty of dust. Certainly enough to grow a nice colony of fungus on. As for moisture, there is an awful lot in the air, you know. Many microorganisms can survive, and thrive, with just this as a resource.

Just clean house once in a while!

[wowbagger]

This is why you should clean you machines once in a while: shut them down (quitcherbitchn about your uptime - it's not a contest!), open the case, and either vacuum (with non-static generating vacuum) or blow (again, with a non-static generating air source) the dust out. Clean the power supply (the 300VDC on the main caps will tend to attract dust) very carefully. Ditto for the monitor: the 27KV anode will pull dust out of the air like a magnet pulls iron filings. (You should see some of the machines I've seen in machine shops/auto garages/printing shops.... Gak!)

Not only will you prevent allergies, you'll keep your system running cooler, help prevent you power supply from sparking out, and have a good chance to check all your fans to see if any are about to fail.

If you are really hard-core, you'll put filters on all intake fans, run positive pressure (i.e. fans blowing in, and air exiting via slots/holes etc.) and clean the filters once a month.

And DON'T SMOKE NEAR YOUR MACHINE! You've no real association for the word "disgusting" until you've worked on a monitor that was used by a smoker. I've seen some monitors that I 'm surprised didn't die of cancer of the CRT, they had so much tar and nicotine on the bottle. You can go through an entire bottle of 99% isopropyl alchohol (DON'T use regular rubbing alcohol, it is 30% water!) and still not get all the gook off.

A clean machine is a happy machine.

Re:Just clean house once in a while!

[Waffle Iron]

And DON'T SMOKE NEAR YOUR MACHINE! You've no real association for the word "disgusting" until you've worked on a monitor that was used by a smoker. I've seen some monitors that I 'm surprised didn't die of cancer of the CRT, they had so much tar and nicotine on the bottle. You can go through an entire bottle of 99% isopropyl alchohol (DON'T use regular rubbing alcohol, it is 30% water!) and still not get all the gook off.

Here's some more important advice: DON'T SMOKE NEAR YOUR LUNGS! You can't swab them out with alchohol. Same goes for your coworkers' lungs.

Re:Just clean house once in a while!

[wowbagger]

The simplest way it to take the power supply outside, and using a source of compressed air blow the dust out.

However, use a source of clean, dry air: don't just go down to your local gas station and use the air for airing up your tires - it frequently has lots of water in it. (when filling your tires, it's a good idea to bleed some air from the air line, and if you see mist, go elsewhere.)

Opening a power supply is really no big deal. The capacitors in the power supply will have bleeder resistors that will pull the charge off them when the power supply is turned off. Just undo the case of the power supply and air it out.

As for a monitor: again, not a big deal. You're not going to be reaching around inside the thing, just hosing it out with compressed air. Don't worry about the charge on the bottle: again, modern monitors have a bleeder resistor that drains the charge off in a few minuts.

Also, the warm up time of an old monitor had nothing to do with "amplifying the power in the coil" - the delay was in heating up the filaments in the tubes used to power the monitor. Until they were hot enough to emit electrons the tubes didn't work. Modern monitors don't use tubes, save for the bottle, and the time for the CRT's filament to heat up is only a few seconds.

However, if you don't feel comfortable opening up your monitor or power supply, then don't. You are the best judge of what you can or cannot do. However, I wouldn't (and don't) worry about it. Just make sure to unplug things when you are working on them.

Re:Just clean house once in a while!

[wowbagger]

Not quite true: read the post again. All modern electronics have bleeder resistors to bleed the charge off the caps for that very reason - so techs don't get shocked.

Secondly, the only thing in a monitor that has anywhere near the charge to kill you is the power supply. The bottle may be charged to very high voltage, but the source impedance is very high. Look at it like this: the bottle sinks about 200-300 watts of power, at 26KVDC or thereabouts. P=VI so I=P/V, so I = 300 Watts/ 26000 V = 11.5 mA, or enough to be felt and that's about it. You need about .1A to kill. And that's assuming the high voltage supply is running. If all you are getting zapped by is the capacitance of the bottle, you will have much less current, and that only for a few milliseconds. The greater risk of damage is from you flinching and hurting yourself.

Now, the power supply, that's a different animal. You have about 300W of power at 300VDC (the first thing any modern power supply does is rectify the AC line voltage to DC). That's 1A of current, more than enough to kill you. Furthur, that's being fed into about 50-100 uF of capacitance, and that will store enough charge to hurt you. Except that the caps in the power supply have 1Mohm bleeder resistors on them, and will drain down within a few seconds of being turned off. The only danger there is if you remove the bleeders - then dielectric recovery will allow the caps to charge back up.

However, IF you don't remove the bleeders, IF you let the monitor have enough time to bleed down, IF you unplug the damn thing before you work, you will be fine.

NOTE: I'm directing this toward cleaning the monitor. You don't need to turn the thing on to clean it. Troubleshooting it is a different matter, since you will have to turn it on to do so. If you are troubleshooting it, then you need to follow all the HV precautions: don't work alone, keep one hand in your pocket (so if you do get bit, the current won't go through your chest, thus reducing the risk of inducing ventricular fibrillation), and use appropriate tools. However, if you have the needed skills to be troubleshooting a monitor, you should already know this, and not need me to tell you.

Trust me, I've worked with everything from 440VAC three-phase power to 40KV laser pulse drive systems to 2KW microwave systems. I'm still here.

How about something to kill the fungus?

[President of The US]

Fungi like dark, warm, environments, no? What if a small fluorescent light were installed in the cases? Perhaps that would help keep the growth down. Or maybe an ultraviolet light? UV is sometimes used to sterilize drinking water and is known to alter the DNA of fungi, bacteria, viruses to keep them from reproducing. There's a chart of how much UV is required to kill certain organisms at http://users.erols.com/markricci/newpage1.htm.

Most computer manufacturers who sell large quantities to hospitals and other health-care facilities would probably be willing to install these.
-----------------------

Re:How about something to kill the fungus?

[Tim]

"UV is sometimes used to sterilize drinking water and is known to alter the DNA of fungi, bacteria, viruses to keep them from reproducing."

And induce skin cancer in human beings. If you're using enough UV to kill a microorganism, you're using more than enough to cause nasty sunburns and eventually, tumors.

Not that this has to happen, of course, but I wouldn't go putting a short-wave UV lamp in any conventional computer case, what with all their openings, and their tendency to be placed under desks (near legs)...

There;s a fungus among us!

[crashnbur]

You don't think there are any lurking variables here? Like the techies that came in with the computers to install them into the hospital? It seems to me that they could offer the same influx of new germs into the environment that a few boxes of metal and plastic could, except that these boxes of metal and plastic generally aren't known to produce, uhh, biohazards.

I'm sorry, but this just doesn't seem right to me. If I were in the hospital, hazard or not, I would rather have a computer in the room and a flatscreen above me so that I may cruise the net while I lie helpless.

Re:There;s a fungus among us!

[Spasemunki]

The point of the article was not that the computers are bringing in new germs or fungus. The fungus existed in the ICU before, carried in by patients and the like. However, patients leave, and most areas of hospitals are regularly scrubbed down with anti-bacterial and anti-fungal products. But if places aren't cleaning the inside of their cases, there is a nice safe haven for fungus and bacteria, which is almost immediately re-introduced into the environment by the exhaust fans of the computer.

"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"

Fungus beware

[tsa]

A warning for you fungus out there: don't grow in computers! You know what heppened to the Mir! It can happen to you too!

Ufies

[nuintari]

is this the beginings of a new nemises for the dust puppy? Since the crud puppy seems to be long gone.

Great! That's just great!

[empesey]

I spend all my time debugging software, and I start worrying about my hardware too?

If I'm lucky, when I'm finished debugging the computer, and throw it over the wall, maybe I'll hit a QA person or two.


--
I'm thinking the monitor might need some debugging too.

Re:Notebooks and flatscreens

[Spasemunki]

I doubt it. It isn't the airflow from the fan that causes the fungus, it's dust and warm, moist air passing through the computer. While laptops might pick up a little less dust, they probably would still take up enough to be contaminated. On the other hand, without active exhausts, like fans, laptops might be less likely to spread the fungus outside of the computer's case, even if it were growing inside.

"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"

Was it really the computers...

[selectspec]

or perhaps the greasy IT admins. If I were this hosptial, I'd look into the hygenic habits of the IT staff first.

Remote the monitor/keyboard, stupid

[satch89450]

If the computer case is the source of the problem, then the case shouldn't be in the ICU patient area. There are a number of off-the-shelf products for moving a monitor, keyboard, and mouse far, far away from the system unit.

So you put the PC cases in a machine closet (with proper AC separate from the ICU AC to keep the machines running cool) and run the KVM extender to a convenient point to the bed in the ICU.

Or use Unix in a closet and run VT-100 terminals...

Re:Remote the monitor/keyboard, stupid

[Aphexian]

Yep, except you are forgetting that all the whirring, humming equipment that are keeping patients in the ICU alive have....wait for it....wait...wait....FANS in them.

Oh my god.

I happen to know this doctor - as a matter of fact I installed 90% of the computers in our little Flint, MI Corporate Super Power's patient rooms. I headed up the project.

This guy was a major pain in my ass, and for no good reason. Infection rates in ICU's spike and drop like the weather. The pattern is totally chaotic, but more than anything it is usually related to the overall health of the healthcare providers that are working on the patient. In addition to their general hygiene.

Additionally, to those who had wondered - no cultures were not taken before the pc's went in. What would they be taking the culture samples from? There wasn't a pc there to swab! The infection rates spiked quickly after the PC's went in, and the medical staff went on a rampage trying to associate the two. Since then the levels have died right back down to normal.

Of course, it could have something to do with one of my techs testing positive for exposure to TB after the project was over.

-Me.

Rats, too

[magi]

My rat seems to have a perverse taste for thin copper wires. I had stored my old computer in my bedroom corner for a while, with one front panel missing. When I opened it for turning it into a web server, I found a pile of chopped wire from the bottom:

http://magi.yok.utu.fi/~magi/kuvia/series/display. cgi/ratputer.ser?height=768 and http://magi.yok.utu.fi/~magi/kuvia/series/display. cgi/ratputer.ser?current=1&height=768

Luckily, I had to replace just the ground wire and the IDE cable, as most other wires are useless anyways (who needs a reset button?). Also the processor's cooler fan wire was cut, but I couldn't figure where it should be connected. Luckily, the processor runs very cool without it, so I guess the cooler is there just to give an impression of a powerful processor?

(The computer in the pictures is now the web server serving the pictures, so please don't slashdot the poor old non-cooled processor too much... )

Had a PC Junior burst into flame, and a 286 too.

[Mr. Flibble]

When I was in high school the computers there were dusty to a level you cannot believe (unless you are a tried and true geek, then I suppose you could...)

I had a 286 begin to smoke, and spark, then it died, all because of the dust inside.

Worse, a IBM PC Junior I was using caught fire because of the amount of dust in it. Suffice it to say that system did not survive either. (I unplugged it, not that that helped stop it from burning, it went out on its own once the dust was consumed.)

To this day whenever a computer crashes anywhere within my vicinity my friends still refer to my "EMP" field that I generate...
(Yes this supposed "field" has crashed *nix boxen too, but not as often as other OS's)

Re:EPROMS

[Technician]

Metal tabs over the windows takes care of that. Most computers are no longer using EPROMS they are using flash or EEPROMS

Quick Note

[crisco]

I've always heard that it only takes 10mA through the heart to kill, so by your calcs it could be dangerous. A quick search didn't turn anything up that would support either claim.

Without lots of knowledge and a little experience, high voltage can be tricky.

In the end though, I'd tend to agree, your monitor's tube is probably only going to give you a good zap, chances are you'll live to tell the story.

Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos

Re:Quick Note

[wowbagger]

Correct: 10 mA through the heart will induce v-fib, however if you are getting zapped through your hand, the current will spread out throughout the torso, and to get a current density high enough to put 10mA through the heart, you'll have to dump at least 100mA total current. Visualize it like this: for any given path, your heart takes up less than 10% of the total cross-sectional area of the chest.