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Keyboards Are Disgusting
fredr1k writes "
A test carried out by Pegasus Lab on account for Swedish magazine PC För alla showed that a normal PC keyboard was infected by more bacteria than a normal toilet seat. More specific it contained 33000 bacteria per square centimeter, compared to 130 on a ordinary toilet seat. The tests also showed occurrence of up to 3100 fungi per square centimeter." Also note that unless you read Swedish, you still have plausible deniability when asked to windex yours.
Just wait until everyone puts spittle everywhere from talking to computers.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Is what's in the keyboard.
There was a Myth Busters episode testing the '5 second rule'. They found the same oddity, the toilet seat was the cleanest place (according to bacteria counts) in the whole shop.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It seems to me that this just points out the way overblown hype against bacteria. Hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people use keyboards every single day, and anecdotally, it doesn't seem like people are getting infections or having other issues (other than things like carpal) at a higher rate in the computer age due to the amount of bacteria found on keyboards (and believe me, it isn't because of increased personal hygene). Now if they further extrapolate and say that while most of the current bacteria is harmless, that keyboards represent excellent carriers in the future for more harmful bacteria, well, that's a more interesting story. But then again, doesn't that just say that you should keep your kb as grundgy as possible to keep those "good" bacteria in and the "bad" bacteria out?
I worked at this large news organization in Atlanta in the .com newsroom. The newsroom was staffed 24/7 with the stations shared between on-duty webmasters. Our keyboards were covered in coffee stains and what appeared to be dry sneeze droplets. Everyday when my shift started, I spent about 20 minutes wiping down my station with screen wipes (contained alcohol). It seemed that whenever one person was sick, it didn't take long before most of the staff had the same thing. I'm guessing the main vector of infection was the keyboard.
There should be enough epidemiologic data that we don't have to rely on bogus measures like "number of germs" to try to estimate the risk of catching something from a keyboard. I suspect it is minimal.
I have a bottle of cleaning fluid that that purports to kill 99.something% of bacteria. Does that make me safer? Probably not; instead I'm helping the natural selection process to breed super-bugs that are resistant to antiseptic.
The specious "germ" argument is exactly the same as the one used to compute risk of intrusion by the number of reported exposures in a software system. What matters is infection/intrusion, not exposure. And it *can* be measured, so why bother to measure the bogus quantities?
toilet seats are cleaner the most other surfaces in a house
and in an office (desk, phone, etc). This was a very diggsian story in that it repeats 10-20 year old information as if it were brand new. The mystery isn't that everything else is so dirty, it's that toilet seats are so clean! And would the results be different if they tested the average Slashdotter's toilet that only gets cleaned twice a year?
not surprising. Fungal spores are nearly omni-present in the environment, and bacteria thrive on your skin at all times. Now, given that the keyboard is open to the surrounding air and has plenty of shielded space, yes, spores will accumulate there. But there's a difference between 3,100 fungal spores/sq. cm and having fungus actually growing there. Also, I have to question that number - 3,100 spores is a lot of spores.
Did the article bother listing precisely what bacteria and fungi they found? I wouldn't be surprised if they mostly found bacterial species from the genera of Bacillus and Staphylococcus with a few gram-negative rods thrown in for good measure. Oh, Propionibacterium acnes is probably pretty common as well. With the fungi it's more of a mixed bag, although most would probably fall into the general category of Ascomycetes.
As for catching the flu from your keyboard... Viruses such as Influenza don't survive on dry, non-porous surfaces for very long. Once the viral envelope has dried out, the virus is pretty much inactivated. You stand a better chance of catching the flu from talking to the person in the next cubicle or on the elevator.
Seriously, I put mine in the dish washer every couple months and have a backup to use while I give it plenty of time to dry out.
It works, although the numbers and letters fade after about 3 times. But then again, I'm not a peeker anyway.
Haven't tried it with a mouse yet.
We *need* this exposure. I'm worried for children growing up in sterilized environments today.
Pretty good article on the subject. The theory being a clean environment leads to an overactive immune system that can develop into severe allergies.
Otherwise, I don't worry: These are _my_ germs, mostly things on my hands that I've already built up an immunity to or have no way of avoiding even if my kbd was sterile. I won't let others use my kbd, and I really try to avoid using others kbds. A much bigger problem is money and door handles. Lots of people touch them and I could get some new virus/bacterium.
BTW: toilet set tops are often very clean. But less so the undersides where women want men to put their fingers to raise and lower toilet seats! Default=up might be more sanitary.
In my last job, I put in about a year as an intern, then worked for an additional eight years at the same place. By my last year there, I was sysadmin, web guy, dba, and first line tech support dude. Usually, I'd wind up dispatching an intern to deal with tech support calls whenever possible.
One call had me responding to a guy whose keyboard was, bar none, the most disgusting I've ever seen. He had left for the day, and I picked up the keyboard because he'd left a USB device plugged into it. Something like a metric ton of dander, hair, and bread/cracker/cookie crumbs fell out of it.
A few weeks later, the building administrator (read: not my boss) sent me a note explaining to me why I needed (read: ordering me) to go to everyone's keyboard, blow out the keys with compressed air, wipe them down, check every key for motility, and wipe down the monitors. After a brief consultation with my boss, I replied that I trusted our employees to be able to handle those maintenance tasks themselves, although I'd be happy to help if there was a specific problem.
All this is by way of saying: some people just don't think about it, and some people just want it to be someone else's problem. But it's your mess, so clean it up, for chrissake.
You take a dump with your pants still up, son?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
To peoples horror, the drinking fountain was way more bacterial than was the toilet water. But when you think about it, when was the last time they used toilet cleaner on the water fountain?
Likewise, your desk, your keyboard, your chair, probably even your monitor probably all have far worse bacteria counts than would a toilet seat in any regularly maintained toilet area. Put away the Lysol.
I am Leviathant and I approve this message.
Air compressors are very helpful, but ultimately you have to get into the nooks and crannies with a Q-tip or something and that is a time-consuming chore.
Yes but air compressors and Q-tips do nothing against microorganisms like Acinetobacter Baumannii which I actually cultured on a keyboard found in an office at the hospital where I work. Guys... ask your local microbiologist what A.baumannii is... it's VERY BAD SHIT!
I'll do my best not to make this sound like flamebait/troll.
Unless you use the palm of your hand to crap, I believe it's the proximity to the bunghole what leads one to believe the buttocks contain more bacteria than your fingers.
A simple case of explosive diarrhea could splatter enough bacteria on your buttocks that could then get passed on to the toilet seat, that's the idea we may (un)consciously have
In any case, I think it's a matter of moral cognitivism. I read about a research proving that there's a moral aspect to taste, one of the experiences being that if someone showed you a turd that look like a turd, eventhough he told you it's made of chocolate, you'd still feel some opposition to the idea of eating it, because your first impression was that it was shit, and you know that shit is not something you should eat. Even if you can corroborate the information, you still feel some moral impediment to eating it.
So yeah, there's a moral impediment attached to the idea of licking the toilet seat, even when we are being shown and research shows that there's more bacteria in a keyboard than in the toilet seat. We don't feel the same way about licking the keyboard.
I'm curious to know how much is on the mouse. The article mentions that there is more bacteria and/or fungii on the enter and space keys because they are used more often... I use my mouse a LOT more than my keyboard...
There's a big difference between the overuse of antimicrobial soaps and hand-sanitizers and the overuse of antibiotics, one of which will have minimal impact on resistance, and one which has major implications.
;)
Assuming you mean the overuse of antibiotics is the one that brings along major implications...
I saw a TV segment a while back that said the active ingredient in anti-bacterial hand soap may become ineffective against bacteria (due to resistance) if it continues to be used as much as it is currently. When you wash your hands, you usually don't need to kill the bacteria; you just want it off your hands--dead or alive--and normal non-anti-bacterial soap will do that. If overuse caused the active ingredient to be ineffective, it would really suck for those times in which you really do need to kill the bacteria on your hands, as in surgical and other sterile situations. (Back to the days where surgeons would just stick their dirty hands into my chest cavity? No thankya...)
So I guess the point to my ramble is that there are major implications of the overuse of both anti-biotics and anti-bacterial soap. I, personally, ain't worried too much about either one; human ingenuity will find a fix if either situation ever arose.
Anyway, I bet my keyboard is a lot dirtier than the ones they sampled... and I'm still fairly healthy. At least physically.