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