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Self Cleaning Mouse
mikesd81 writes "LEWIS Wire is reporting on a self-cleaning mouse that disables the survival of bacteria with an auto-disinfecting surface. From the article: 'According to a recent survey from the University of Arizona, the average desk harbors 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat. Despite this, office workers rarely have time to clean their desktops frequently or thoroughly enough to be effective. As a result, the presence of microbes contributes to the spread of pneumonia, the flu, pink eye and strep throat, among other extremely contagious viruses.'"
If you "disinfect" a surface, it's like clear-cutting a rain-forest. You've upset the balance, making a fresh new playground where the really baad and hardy weeds might take hold.
so how long will that survive on the surface? It'll have to be tough to withstand ordinary wear and tear... the contact points where my fingers hold the mouse on my desktop are already worn smooth and the mouse has only been in use for 6 months... sounds like snake-oil to me especially the nano-particle crap...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
If the average desk harbours 400% more bacteria than the average toilet seat wouldn't it have a helluva lot to do with the relative surface area of each.
According to a recent survey from the University of Arizona, the average desk harbors 400 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat.
There's even more bacteria INSIDE YOU! And no, they're not only "your" bacteria. They are in fact bacteria that you ate, breathed in and so on and so on. They live and breed inside you, and defecate inside you! They also *eat* from whatever is laying around (i.e. YOU).
Shocking? Well it better not be, since they're not going away any time soon. I'm sick of gem-counting revelations and toilet seat comparisons.
I'm proud to say I use a regular dirty mouse and keyboard and I'm still alive and healthy. If someone is concerned he might catch something bad from a computer mouse, he wouldn't be alive to buy this product anyway.
Seriously: if the current contamination really were a problem, we would all be dead. But we aren't, and why? Because the human body has a immune system. So I bet, such a self-cleaning mouse, or even completely sterile desks deployed everywhere wouldn't have any impact on the infection rates.
Actually, desinfecting too much actually leads to other problems. Current studies suggest that too much hygiene may be a big factor in the recent increases of allergies. Also, fighting too aggressively against any kind of etiologic agents only produces more resistant etiologic agents. A prominent example is the Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a Staph.A. strain that developed antibiotic resistance and is responsible for a good share of all nosocomial infections (i.e. infections you get that you get in hospital but are otherwise unrelated to your actual treatment there).
IANAMD (I am not an MD), but I have an education as combat medic in the Austrian Army where infectiology is a huge subject during education.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
The problem is, when you mention bacteria to the average person, they think bad things because we've learned that bad bacteria can make us sick. That's why I hate most studies that proclaim the bacteria count is such and such.
Unfortunately, these "studies" are usually trying to convince us to buy an anti-bacterial soap, or as in this case a self cleaning mouse so they play on people's fears and doubts to make them want to buy it, ie... it's just FUD.
And of the other 3%, most of them we couldn't survive without and the primary way they can harm us is by dying. The human lifeform is symbiotic with a whole bunch of bacterial species, which do everything from cleaning your eyeballs to assisting with digestion. The biosphere relies on bacteria to maintain everything from soil conditions to oxygen levels in the atmosphere.
Killing bacteria to stop infections is like chopping off people's hands to stop shootings - before they happen.
Except influenze is caused by a VIRUS, NOT a bacteria. How is this anti-bacterial mouse going to protect against the Flu?
The mark of a mature person is not creating arbitrary criteria for considering others mature.