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Lifting The Lid On Computer Filth
IainMH writes "There's a story over at BBC News about how work stations contain nearly 400 times as many microbes than lavatories. Gross. 'A desk is capable of supporting 10 million bacteria and the average office contains 20,961 germs per square inch, according to research. ... By contrast, the average toilet seat contains 49 germs per square inch, the survey showed.'"
Really, when you think of your computer area, you don't think of bacteria as you would when you think about a bathroom, so you're less inclined to clean it to the extent you would a bathroom. But either way, pretty much everything else is as equally as bacteria ridden. It's like the test they did on Myth Busters where they tested to see if a tooth brush left by the toilet would really pick up fecal matter, and they found out that tooth brushes all over the building had the same amount of fecal matter on them after a month of use.
Buckethead
I'll seccond that. I'm in a college dorm, and as the local computer guru, I get called upon all the time to fix "broken" machines and install hardware (hey, easy money). I ran into one computer that someone inherited from a friend who recently graduated. The power supply was on the blink and the machine would only turn on "when it wanted to." Opening the case showed the horrible truth: All the once PCB green cards and motherboard were covered in gray fur. There was a good five years of dorm room dust coating every surface, not to mention several moths I pulled from behind the bezel. I had to take the whole think outside with an air duster to get anywhere near the power supply. I didnt actually open the PS once I had it out, but the cloud of dust that arrose when I dropped it in the dumpster told me all I needed to know.
Moral of the story? Keep it clean!
The main concern with the bacteria that live in your colon is that they break down the things that you find indigestible (cellulose, left over protein etc) and produce toxic byproducts. These toxic byproducts are the dangerous things and have to be expelled regularly. They are only safe because once they leave your body, you generally don't eat them up again. The workstation bacteria are probably mostly air bacteria that have found a nice area full of skin flakes and cookie crumbs to breed on. nothing to worry about.
Now if you combined the food rich environment of your keyboard with the poison producing bacteria from your colon, you start to have a real problem.
You're right. I'd never seen people with many warts on their hands (yes, I felt I had to qualify that ;)) until I worked at my first job. In fact, I'd hardly ever seen warts in my life. In that one company of about 20 people at least 5 people had 5 or more warts on their hands. Unsurprisingly I got my first wart within a year. Very virulent and took a long time to get rid of them. Before my immune system finally kicked in I had more than 30... and now I have few scars from the N2 treatment that was applied to some of them. I blame keyboards for this (and sharing them). Filthy things. Spreaders of disease!
My father-in-law recently told me a great story about this. His current customer wanted the onsite tech to swap out some 100 keyboards because they were in disgusting shape. Instead of putting the company through all the harassment of replacing the keyboards for free, he decided to try having the cafeteria steam clean the keyboards.
He tasked a couple of box monkeys with splitting the keyboards open and pulling the keyboard assemblies out, separating them from the electronics. The cafeteria ran them through the high pressure steam cleaning dishwasher system, and they came out looking and working like new! Strange but true.
Intelligent Life on Earth
I was in a lecture one day and our lecturer said:
"There are about 10^13 cells in the human body. There are also about 10^14 bacteria living in and on the average human body.
That means each one of the cells in your body is outnumbered by bacteria 10-1.
Now, turn around in your seat and look at the person next to you, and think about just what you are looking at..."
(I checked the figures here)
Up here in the Great White North we had a bit of a pinkeye outbreak a few years ago. There was a particularly virulent strain that made its way onto campus, and spread like crazy via all the public computer keyboards. Word on the street was that between half and two-thirds of the campus might have had pinkeye that winter. The CDC even sent some people up to study it. Just goes to show what a few dirty keyboards can do.
Water won't damage most keyboards. My wife spilled sweetened tea into my desktop keyboard. I disconnected it and rinsed it off in the shower. I towel dried it, then left a fan blowing on it overnight. In the morning (and ever since, about two years), it has worked perfectly. The "trick" is not to operate the keyboard with water in it (plug it out as quickly as possible), and let it dry completely before plugging it back in.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
PC World also notes on this subject. Fellowes is announcing that they are going to begin injecting a product called "Microban" into their keyboards and mice, to create an environment where bacteria cannot survive and grow.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
In my office we have an ozone generator that comes on after hours for a few hours. Ozone is a good oxidizer therefore o good sanitizer that can be circulated through the air. If the computers are left running at night the bacterias will get pretty well oxidized on a daily basis. Ozone, being an unstable molecule (O3) breakes back down into oxygen (O2) by morning. If you're paranoid about bacteria you might try this. I haven't noticed much difference in health, but it smells nice and fresh in the morning.
I used to service PC's in a hospital, and they were a mess. Systems in the sterile areas, the compromised immunity area especially, you had to bag and remove before you could open them up. Dust carries some dangerous stuff, and in the compromised immunity wing you couldn't even move a ceiling tile or change a light fixture without removing the patent. The first time a nurse saw the inside of a PC from that ward, she remarked "That pretty much could have killed the patient who shared the room with the computer".
At a different hospital I was at for a short time, no such policies for removing systems exist. Scary.
-G "We love to buy books, because we are buying the belief we have time to read them" - Warren Zevon